Social Media – Stage Set for the Ego

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Digital vs. real identity, “invented” identity, identity theft, things that you intentionally divulge and those you reveal unknowingly


Martina Mara,mediaresearcher at the Ars Electronica Futurelab

The alarm clock rings, though instead of an actual alarm clock it’s an app. You snatch your smartphone and hit Snooze, but your thumb just happens to click on Facebook or Twitter or Google+ or whatever else you’re on. Totally automatically. You’re not even completely awake yet and you’re already online: “Did somebody post something else last night? How do the others like my new profile picture? And who forwarded my joke? I mean, it was totally hilarious. I didn’t make it up or anything, but, like, who cares.” No sooner are you up than you’re at the hub of a wheel that never stops turning. Because what’s turning isn’t just one wheel but a million gears. And hardly anyone asks himself what role he’s playing in this.

This used to be easier, somehow. You went to school, to college, to work, and in the morning you put on a mask—the face, the identity that you wanted to project, the way you wanted to be perceived by others. Depending on which people you got together with, you might have put on a different mask, since other people have different preconceptions, different wishes, different fears and dreams. After all, everyone aims to please, to come across as likeable. Or at least not to raise eyebrows.

For a long time, person-to-person exchange was the only way to get to know somebody. Of course, you could do some investigating and, especially in the case of celebrities, find out a thing or two, but if you didn’t happen to be working for an intelligence agency, finding out how someone spends his/her time was a pretty difficult undertaking.

The internet changed this situation hand in hand with social media, which were undoubtedly dubbed as such for reasons of coolness since there’s virtually nothing about them that’s all that socially conscious. It all started with tech-heads and/or extroverts rigging up their own websites (does anybody still recall Geocity?!). But the networking among these sites was difficult, and a dynamic process of exchange never really got going due to the rather unwieldy technology.

Then, all at once, it took off. With Friendster and Myspace, with uboot (ja ja, the largest German-language website of this type), StudiVZ and of course Facebook & Twitter, later Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Xing, networks for folks who wanted to do networking without having to. For every sector its own network, which are now increasingly interwoven with each other too. And suddenly, everybody had to have a profile because, after all, you have to showcase yourself somehow.

And when you’re offered a spot in the limelight, needless to say you have to make sure it doesn’t make you look too bad. Your profile photo is already 12 years old? Well, come on, you haven’t changed all that much, and you don’t see those 2, 3 more kilos in your face anyway. How often do you get some serious exercise? Naturally, at least four times a week—I mean, who wants arteriosclerosis? One supports African children, congratulates Obama on election victories, and that after-work happy hour inevitably turns into the biggest party in the history of the world. After all, one likes to do things in style!

For a long time, this digital identity—which is far more than what you reveal about yourself—actually did exist solely in the proximity of computers. But in recent years, due to the advent of smartphones, this has once again been endowed with a completely new quality. Anything you do can be shared with others, everywhere, all the time. You often have the feeling that something didn’t really happen if at least one person isn’t twittering about it. So your own adventures are constantly available just like everybody else’s. The digital I increasingly inserts itself into the “real” world. The management of one’s self-portrayal online, the image that one would like others to behold, becomes ever more complex.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Do we need to be afraid of this? Should we criticize it? There are no simple answers to these questions, but every one of us should definitely be giving them some thought. It would appear that the internet is going to be around for a while. The question of what traces we leave behind—and no longer only virtually—will soon take up a considerable portion of our lives, if it isn’t doing so already.

Something else to look forward to: Martina Mara, media researcher at the Ars Electronica Futurelab and expert in the fields of digital identities and the Web, social media, robots & androids, and human-robot interaction will soon be gracing this blog as guest author. Do yourself a favor and check her out!