Online Personalities

What is your online personality? 



There are definite types, aren't there? Some of us post in a way that gives no real clue to our own thoughts, simply recycling the information, comments, jokes, aphorisms and photos of others. It may just be possible to guess something about our mood from our choice of subject. Others do the opposite, bearing our souls to the world by telling stories about how the day has gone, sharing excitements and bemoaning problems at length and, we realise later, with perhaps too little thought for the feelings of others involved in the situations.

Do you control your temper at all times? Or are you given to the occasional exasperated spat with fellow tweeters? It can be surprising what suddenly gets you riled and, just as in 'real life', it can often have more to do with something you read six tweets ago than the actual tweet or post you are responding to. Days when there has been some dreadful disaster or political crisis seem especially prone to this kind of activity as someone picks someone else up for allegedly over- or under-reacting.

Do you wisely steer clear of all talk about personal relationships, or do you find yourself sharing the latest quarrel you've had with your partner and asking for advice and supportive comment? Do you steer clear of mentioning work, entirely respecting principles of confidentiality and loyalty to colleagues, employers and clients? Can you resist the temptation to tell stories that will identify people and situations that have annoyed, betrayed or upset you? Or do you use the internet to administer a good telling-off to companies that have made life difficult by failing in some aspect of their service?

Are your posts mostly political, personal, artistic, religious, humorous, practical or fantastical? Are you the one known for sharing recipes and pictures of garden produce or for bombarding your friends with invitations to sign petitions? Are you welcomed for providing an endless supply of pictures of unicorns or for promoting your own blogposts, pictures and poetry? Or are you famous for your involvement in training for the next sporting event with daily updates and sponsorship requests? Is your choice of subjects balanced and varied or does it suggest a 'specialism' (or perhaps an obsession)?

We all reveal far more than we realise, even those of us who think we're careful and controlled in what we put out on the internet. I find that I'm beginning to have a sort of affection for my internet community and it differs from the kind of affection I have for my real-life network of friends. Among my community there are people I've never met but who regularly contribute insights that I value and that have occasionally had a significant influence on my life. There are people who draw my attention to things I would never normally be aware of left to myself or who direct me to sources of information I now use regularly but would never have found on my own. There are others who can be relied on for an encouraging 'well done' and some who have interjected an unexpected comment that has the power of a 'well-done' simply because it was unexpected and, hey, they've noticed. 

Then there are the folk I've known but seldom see. It's heart-warming to see photos of their growing families, to hear news and to be able to feel a connection across the miles - maybe reaching as far as a different continent. You can of course feel instinctively that you have more in common with someone who lives in another culture entirely than you do with the person sitting across the table from you. And it's great to see projects I've been associated with taking new and different directions, though occasionally disappointing too. I have really appreciated the times that someone has responded to a post - 'You're in the area? Can we get together?' Or I've seen that a friend is on a visit to the UK and been able to set up a meeting. And I love being able to keep in touch with former students - maybe just once in a blue moon - to see that they have made a presentation at the UN or moved to a new kind of work or written a book.

Sadly, too, there have been times when I've become aware of someone's illness or death only through internet contact. On occasion this has resulted in renewed real-time contact and the possibility of visiting a dear friend before their death. At other times news has reached me too late and left me with that feeling of deep regret that the potential to renew friendship has gone - don't we all have past friendships we hope to renew in the future 'when we are less busy' or 'when we both retire'? The grief experienced at the loss of these has, for me, been heightened by the dawn of digital communication. There are a few friends whose families have left their statuses in place (or perhaps this hasn't been a deliberate decision but they have simply not known how to remove them.) This and the existence of 'memorial' sites is a new phenomenon we are coming to terms with. It's worth thinking about - what plans, if any, will you make for your own online persona after your death?

And then there can be times when you inadvertently stumble across something that relates to you that you didn't know was there. Maybe it's a welcome find! Some nice student has quoted you in their dissertation (always flattering) or a friend has made an appreciative comment about you and recommended your breed of wisdom to someone else - or just repeated your joke! Maybe it's not so affirming. Someone has named and criticised you for a past misdemeanour you have no recollection of and do not recognise - clearly their memory and yours do not co-incide. Should you comment? Probably not! Or maybe there is a concerted effort to bring your name into disrepute by a Facebook group or an anonymous blogger? Perhaps someone has misappropriated a photo you took (or one you feature in) for some purpose you really don't approve of? Or you have become the subject of plagiarism or bullying. What does forgiveness look and feel like, what does it require of us in this newly public and almost universally accessible network of relationships? How can we 'forgive' those we have never met or who have never identified themselves? In the pre-digital era it was not possible for prospective partners, friends or employers or indeed journalists and historians to pull our pasts quite so forcefully into the present and have them affect our future for good or ill. When we shape the reputation of others by what we post on the internet, we carry a heavy responsibility. 

Real life personalities and online ones can be subtly different. Shy people become more dominant, over-users get ignored, infrequent commentators are noticed and listened to, shadow-side attributes and hidden talents come to the fore. The never-angry person always complains, the prosaic administrator turns out to be a fantastically observant photographer capable of portraying the natural world in extraordinarily beautiful ways. Communities form around the most unexpected people and break up suddenly or fade away without anyone noticing except the one person for whom it was a life-line.

Most people don't spend much time consciously thinking about their personality or how they impact other people. It tends to be when we go to team-building events, on a retreat or enter counselling that we self-consciously examine who we are and how we come across. Behaviour on the internet is not an exact replica of behaviour in 'real' life but it has in common with it the ability to impact others powerfully for good or for bad. We all know people whose horizons have been opened up by the internet and we know others who have been damaged by it. Sometimes both are true for the same individual. Most of us, once introduced to it, get into the grip of its fascination in ways that can be challenging and hard to control. 

Before what historians call 'modernity', people acknowledged individual personality but they also understood themselves to be located within an extended family, a local community, a clan or a tribe that had a strong sway over them and defined the possibilities of what it was to be human in that context. Think, for example, of Old Testament sagas like those of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, Isaac, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers; individuals are set within a defining tribe or subset of a tribe or they are ejected or displaced and this, at least in part, defines who they are and what is expected of them. During the Enlightenment period which heralded what philosophers describe as 'the turn to the subject', the concept of the individual became that of the person who, through choice, is self-defining and self-referential. Increasingly we have thought of ourselves in terms of people shaped by our genes, our immediate family and our own endeavour, differentiated from one another by the autonomous decisions we make in time and space. The dawn of the internet and the digital world is slowly beginning to make a similarly revolutionary impact on our understanding of the self and we are now just beginning to see the effect of this on personality and our own sense of who we are. What we have previously thought of as our 'real' selves now swims (for want of a better word) along a river with changing currents - at one moment buffeted by the responsibilities of those with whom we are geographically, spatially and practically linked and at the next pulled along by those to whom our connections and responsibilities are partially or entirely non-spatial, located in abstracts such as attitude, reputation, celebrity, anonymity, power to access knowledge, image and internet space. We are becoming people who understand ourselves in a new way and there is no going back as more and more people become deeply immersed in the culture - or some might say cult - of digital personality.