Who am i?Digital space has, of course, opened up an entire new existence for people. On the internet, you have much more control over your personal than you do face-to-face. Of course, this ability changes us. Complete strangers see us every day on Twitter, LinkedIn, our blogs, and we welcome it. For some reason, we want these strangers to see us, to read our words, hear our voices in some way. Our persona on the internet has the potential to be so crafted, so controlled, that often that is exactly what we do.
LinkedIn is a space where we dress up our achievements and ourselves and present a polished, formal, professional human being. We interact in a way that is lightly social, but mostly revolves around our industry and our networks. We share very little personal information with our peers on LinkedIn, and unlike other websites, we refer to the people we interact with on LinkedIn as “connections,” rather than “friends.” It’s completely impersonal. Twitter is different in a strange way. We don’t have friends on Twitter either, we have “followers,” which is odd, since it connotes the idea that the Tweeter is someone worth following, a leader or deity. Think about it: calling a group of people your followers, regardless of your relationship with them a-digitally is kind of strange, and no one questions it, or if they do, it’s not often and it’s not very prominent. Facebook then, is completely different. Everyone on Facebook is your friend, even if you barely know them. Relationships become “Facebook official” because you’ve made it public. Everything becomes a matter of whether it should be public or not, facets of our lives end up out in the open. Our birthdays, familial connections, game scores, pictures of our faces, which can now be searched with on Google to find us everywhere. Facebook is a ridiculously nosy thing, and people often give it every bit of information it wants, including their address, where they are when they’re there, etc. We create whole identities for ourselves on the internet that exist as separate parts of our "real life" identities. Because of the higher level of control we have, and the blandness of written language, we often end up presenting ourselves differently from the way we are presented in person. Humans have always adapted to different social situations, but to bounce between different personas as you change tabs in a browser seems a bit schizophrenic. |
How people present themselves in popular digital spacesFacebook
Traits: informal, invasively personal, often TMI Interacts with: almost every other social media on the planet, and most apps People on Facebook typically only sort of care about what they post. Pictures of their vacations, their new car, holidays, concerts, where they go, why they're there, who they're with, their jobs, their schools, who their family members are. Everything that can be posted about a person usually is. Twitter
Traits: brief, funny, usually less personal, frequent updates, celebrities and organizations tend to be more active, hashtags Interacts with: Facebook, Instagram, Vine People on Twitter tweet fairly frequently, usually about something that happened in their day or something interesting going on in pop culture or in their professional field. Hashtags are used to create and connect with conversations about certain topics, anything from TV shows to social problems to big events. Instagram
Traits: highly visual, usually picture of food or selfies, only for mobile Interacts with: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Flickr Instagram is a place where people post pictures of their faces, their meals, their pets, or their vacations. Instagram use is much more frequent while the user is on vacation. People use Instagram because it allows them to post pictures from their phone to most of their social media in one go, rather than uploading it a bunch of different times. LinkedIn
Traits: highly professional, job search, networking, mostly textual Interacts with: WordPress blogs can post to it, and news articles will often allow you to share with LinkedIn People use LinkedIn in a professional regard, they connect with people in their field or workplace. It's often used to screen potential employees or even to find them. Vine
Traits: 6-second video posting; stop motion, small quatrains, almost always silly Interacts with: Twitter, Facebook People use Vine to post tiny videos about what's going on. They last for only six seconds, so most people use them to film either themselves saying something or doing something silly or something happening. Because it's so short, it's hard to post seriously. |