Have you ever found yourself personalizing an experience for yourself? Be it in your room, your car, your notebooks, or even your Facebook profile, personalization is an often-used method of finding originality within our daily lives. However, Eli Pariser’s TED Talk is startling as he lays judgement on “personalization” done by sites and apps across the internet that tailor their experience to what they believe a user will like more, based on their personal data. A frightening thought, yet an interesting result of this phenomenon is the Facebook News Feed. In the News Feed, “stories” are published to a user from other users that are predicted to be more interesting to a user. As well, Facebook notes that “the number of comments and likes a post receives and what kind of story it is (ex: photo, video, status update) can also make it more likely to appear in your News Feed.” With all this in mind, well-liked stories populate a person’s newsfeed, prompting a certain type of exigence with positive, affirming posts doing the most successfully.
In a world that promotes the possibility of a person self-monitoring through sites such as Facebook, a problematic situation may arise when a person’s online persona doesn’t match up with their personality and actions in real life. This situation was comically taken on by the Higton brothers, as well as by Zilla van den Born, when she faked a trip to Southeast Asia using Facebook updates and by visiting various Asian restaurants in her home town. With such a disconnect between what is posted and what is true on Facebook, when such posts are being “liked” and reinforced as appropriate exigence for the context of Facebook, it contributes to the idea that the user benefits from self-monitoring to the point of creating whole personality, or social media alter-ego, that may perform differently than they would in real life.
This kind of action may result in “friends” and others within social networks only knowing an image of who their friends truly are, with that image being a shadow of what that friend may truly “like” and whom they like being. Are you the same person online? Does it even matter? With this in mind, do these accounts of our lives captured through Facebook “stories” and posts really portray an accurate account of human experience in general?
Please comment and add your thoughts! I would love to hear your feedback.
I think that most people definitely do put out a different version of themselves online that’s far from how they are in reality. This point was actually raised in my Social Psychology class earlier this week, and we discussed this idea of the ‘better than average’ bias. People will tend to overestimate their own positive attributes and display an exaggerated version of themselves if it makes them look and feel good (even if it isn’t necessarily accurate). This can be seen when analyzing social interactions through websites like Facebook, where status updates and pictures will receive praise (in the form of ‘likes’), and this reinforces for the OP that people care about what they have to say. With the exception of internet trolls, who get to hide behind the anonymity of the internet, most people that have online personas will make themselves appear to be much more fun and outgoing than they may truly be in real life. As a user of Facebook myself, I can attest to the fact that it’s nice when people like your posts and acknowledge what you have to say. However I don’t see it as a measure of how much people truly like you, from the amount of ‘likes’ that your posts get on Facebook.
– Tanzeela Piyasha Parveen
Hi James! Thank you for sharing your very thought-provoking entry. I like how you coined the term “social media alter-ego”; it’s true, we are almost obliged to create certain personas on social networks, like it’s a pre-requisite for social acceptance. But who really benefits from this “alter-ego”? If we are aware that our online profiles don’t reflect who we are in reality, what motivates us to do so? Your last paragraph made me think of two aspects of online portrayals that affect our persona in reality: online communication and online recruitments.
In some ways, certain forms of online communication doesn’t always reflect how we converse in person. For example, sometimes my own messages include phrases like, “Hey girl,” “Yo yo yo,” or “Ciao for now,” but I hardly use these phrases when communicating face-to-face. One of the potential reasons for this tendency is perhaps to appear witty or humorous in the conversation, only to realize its lack of effectiveness later on. Go figure.
Online recruitments remind me of one scenario back when I was an amateur Facebook-user, thusly naïve regarding the effects of distorted online portrayals. I was invited to an event by a “friend” via Facebook and I accepted, thinking it was a legitimate action. However, once I ran into her at the event she proceeded to tell me that she sends out mass invites online without expecting anybody to show up, which I found rather shocking; if she was not expecting people to show up, what was the point of inviting people in the first place? In this particular scenario, inviting someone to an event via Facebook might portray the impression of a civil, polite personality in the eyes of the internet media; however, this impression is distorted upon discovering that there was no genuine intent for this action to begin with.
hey james, i rmbr what you said abt black soup last class & i just got to the page where fred talks abt it in his weird going-on-a-tangent kind of way. i think his grandfather drinks it like many farming families in china do bc they r poor & do not waste anything from a meal. its similar to congee i guess. without anything nutritious in it. my family makes it with a bit of cornmeal sometimes, not from the remnants of cooked rice tho. ppl have rice cookers now so that’s irrelevant. my grandparents were raised in a farming community & they used to reuse the water to wash dishes for like a month (they mite b exaggerating, who knows……). fred wah makes me wanna chat w my grandparents more but my mandarin is horrendous plus im never home. anyway, ciao