One of the most profound changes to humanity brought on by the ubiquitous web is the changing notion of the self. As individuals we are used to crafting our identity to meet the expectations of a given group or circumstance. To quote William James:
In the not to distant past we were all expected to adhere to certain roles with more rigidity than met the eye. For me, there was work Jeff, husband Jeff, son & brother Jeff, friend Jeff, etc. It was a time when the inter-mingling of, say, old friends and people from the office had the makings of high comedy. It's what Erving Goffman referred to as audience segregation--the individual ensures that those before whom he plays one of his parts will not be the same individuals before whom he plays a different part in another setting. But the ubiquitous Web is changing all that.
I do not know if it was our desire to connect that gave rise to the ubiquitous web or if it was the web that led us down this path but, either way a new dimension has opened up that, depending on your perspective, is either causing great discomfort as social worlds collide or feelings of liberation because we feel no longer bound by these norms and can be closer to our 'authentic' self. Odds are you've felt both ways at one time or another.
This is because the ubiquitous web 'produces multiple orderings of time and space which cross the online-offline boundary' (Hine). It allows us to 'connect observations from different times & spaces not accessible simply from within a physical space' (Fields and Kafir). In other words, there is part of us out there in public all the time, whether we're present or not.
Twitter provides a great example of what I'm talking about because it combines the immediacy of a chat room with the long-term capability of a discussion forum. And, for the most part, it's done out in the great wide open. All your followers are in on it regardless of whether the conversation is directed, or of interest, to them making it difficult to impossible to segregate our audience. Work people see friend Jeff and so on. This in turns causes a dilemma as to which part of the self, and how much, we're to reveal.
For some this is a bigger issue than for others. The great discomfort is manifested with reactions like, "Why would anyone want to know I'm at the grocery store?" Or, "I think that work doesn't appreciate him posting his run times over lunch." But the underlying issue lies in the discomfort over the revealing of things that are not normally revealed to a given audience. This may be the reason behind why a lot of people labeled 'laggards' resist as much as they do. You may not think twice about telling a friend you shop at a certain discount store but, do you want your boss and colleagues to know?
I say all this as someone who has decided, after much angst, to be out there as much as I comfortably can, which is pretty open by many standards. By nature, I tend to see progress as an unfolding of the inevitable and generally speaking I like to explore the possibilities and make of things what I can. But it doesn't mean I don't empathize with those who resist, regardless of whether or not I think the decision is the best or most prudent one.
However, the rub for us all is that its becoming more difficult not to be a full participating member of your community(ies) if you're not out there. Now much of the human connection and conversation that is hardwired into who we are occurs in this hybrid format, in the cloud and on Terra firma, in the moment and over time. The blending of online and offline space and time necessitates a very necessary and very human shift in our understanding of who we are and how we're to act in a given circumstance.
This isn't about being phony. It's about presenting the appropriate representation of who you are to meet the moment. For example, we surely don't talk to our boss the way we do our children. Nor our significant others like our co-workers. With each circumstance comes an expectation of behavior. There are norms and customs that, we trust, can guide us safely through any interaction. We also take great pains to keep these different groups, and, by proxy our different selves, separate. Or at least we used to."...we may practically say that he [an individual] has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups."
In the not to distant past we were all expected to adhere to certain roles with more rigidity than met the eye. For me, there was work Jeff, husband Jeff, son & brother Jeff, friend Jeff, etc. It was a time when the inter-mingling of, say, old friends and people from the office had the makings of high comedy. It's what Erving Goffman referred to as audience segregation--the individual ensures that those before whom he plays one of his parts will not be the same individuals before whom he plays a different part in another setting. But the ubiquitous Web is changing all that.
I do not know if it was our desire to connect that gave rise to the ubiquitous web or if it was the web that led us down this path but, either way a new dimension has opened up that, depending on your perspective, is either causing great discomfort as social worlds collide or feelings of liberation because we feel no longer bound by these norms and can be closer to our 'authentic' self. Odds are you've felt both ways at one time or another.
This is because the ubiquitous web 'produces multiple orderings of time and space which cross the online-offline boundary' (Hine). It allows us to 'connect observations from different times & spaces not accessible simply from within a physical space' (Fields and Kafir). In other words, there is part of us out there in public all the time, whether we're present or not.
Twitter provides a great example of what I'm talking about because it combines the immediacy of a chat room with the long-term capability of a discussion forum. And, for the most part, it's done out in the great wide open. All your followers are in on it regardless of whether the conversation is directed, or of interest, to them making it difficult to impossible to segregate our audience. Work people see friend Jeff and so on. This in turns causes a dilemma as to which part of the self, and how much, we're to reveal.
For some this is a bigger issue than for others. The great discomfort is manifested with reactions like, "Why would anyone want to know I'm at the grocery store?" Or, "I think that work doesn't appreciate him posting his run times over lunch." But the underlying issue lies in the discomfort over the revealing of things that are not normally revealed to a given audience. This may be the reason behind why a lot of people labeled 'laggards' resist as much as they do. You may not think twice about telling a friend you shop at a certain discount store but, do you want your boss and colleagues to know?
I say all this as someone who has decided, after much angst, to be out there as much as I comfortably can, which is pretty open by many standards. By nature, I tend to see progress as an unfolding of the inevitable and generally speaking I like to explore the possibilities and make of things what I can. But it doesn't mean I don't empathize with those who resist, regardless of whether or not I think the decision is the best or most prudent one.
However, the rub for us all is that its becoming more difficult not to be a full participating member of your community(ies) if you're not out there. Now much of the human connection and conversation that is hardwired into who we are occurs in this hybrid format, in the cloud and on Terra firma, in the moment and over time. The blending of online and offline space and time necessitates a very necessary and very human shift in our understanding of who we are and how we're to act in a given circumstance.
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