Tuesday, 3 February 2009
Lecture 3 - Selves and Others Online
I find it quite a hard 'topic' to try and analyse as it can be suggested that online people have all these different persona's but to try and explain why is not easy. This is because you can say that they are trying to be something else, something better, but for what reason? You could ask someone why, but I am not sure you will ever get the real answer. For example, in the lecture David asked if anyone ever tries to be someone a little different to themselves on a website (Myspace, Facebook) and no-one put their hand up, however, i don't think even this is true. Even i who strongly believe in 'being who you are' and loving someone for that not something fake, have changed my profile picture on Facebook depending on how I’m feeling; perhaps what persona i am undertaking that week? I have changed it to really mad ones when i maybe want to try and make out like I’m fun! Then have ones of me and all my friends... is this showing that i also care about my friends a lot? We have all had those 'bad' photo's tagged (myself very recently!) and have either untagged them so people do not think we're silly/ugly etc (changing persona) or have kept them up to appear like we're really laid back and don't mind ... but are we really laid back and don’t care? Or are we cringing but wanting the laid back persona? Will we ever know? We can guess, we can ask, but will we ever get the real answers?
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I think that with them kind of personas because they are not extreme, the internet is a perfect way to reflect how you feel. Like you say, changing your photo is no different to changing your clothes ( bright when your feeling happy, and dark colours when you feel down). I just think that when people purposely change their persona, by pretending they are male when they are female etc is pushing the boundaries too far!
ReplyDeletei see your point kerry, i'm now just thinking about how i act on facebook. Also another question is why do we even put our pictures up for everyone to see anyway. It is as if we want everyone to see our persona, it is if we are showing off.
ReplyDeleteI never thought about personas like this, I supose we do want to show of a certain identity to people via our facebook accounts. We want people to see that the life we are living is full. The lecture made me think so much about completely changing your "self" that I forgot about the smaller changes we might make, however, we are not lying about who we are, just showing one side to ourselves off.
ReplyDeleteI agree with clare about going too far when you feel the need to completely change yourself. I think how can someone get to know and love you if they are not knowing the REAL you?
It’s a topic to think about isn't it! It has got me wanting to know all the answers to why we change our profiles, why some act different ways in forums, but I’m not sure that i could even tell you why i myself change my profile. I don't really know... its just something we do! Why though!? We didn't before these facebook/myspace sites existed, so is it something in society changing today? Or is just the internet becoming more accessible?
ReplyDeleteI completely agree Kerry. Do you think that to some extent everyone subconcsiously changes their personalities around different people or in different situations. People say 'I'm always myself' but I don't think this is ever true.
ReplyDeleteIt's great to see a discussion getting going like this - well done people for engaging with each others' ideas.
ReplyDeleteAs to the question of whether continual tweaking of online identity is to do with something in society changing today - perhaps you could think about that notion of lifestyles as compared to "a way of life" that we thought about in Perspectives and Living Culture. In other words, life is fragmented into many different areas now - uni friends, home friends, family, work colleagues, etc - 100 years ago these would have been much more intermingled and for many of us not existed. So if we get used to putting on different faces for different audiences, then isn't the Web just offering more of these fragmented audiences to perfom to? This is quite simplistic, but does recognise that, as some of the comments above suggest it isn't internetting that makes people do something new - we just extend our habits into this domain (perhaps!) ....so can we say playing with identity is a "natural" human attribute, or is it culturally or technologically conditioned?
...and by the way, why is changing your gender "going too far"? Are you saying that there is a limit to how much people ought to be allowed to tweak their identity? Who should set the rules for this, do you think?!
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