There’s an old Chris Rock joke where he’s musing about why relationships are so hard to maintain. What he hits on is that relationships deteriorate because sooner or later you have to show the other person who you really are, and it’s all downhill from there:
That’s right, man. Relationships: easy to get into, hard to maintain. Why are they so hard to maintain? Because it’s hard to keep up the lie. ‘Cause you can’t get nobody being you. You got to lie to get somebody. You can’t get nobody looking like you look, acting like you act…sounding like you sound. When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them. You’re meeting their representative.
(It’s funnier when he says it, but I couldn’t find good video of it on-line.)
What Rock’s saying is that we all choose which parts of ourselves we present to others, because the truth is a little too ugly for polite society. The trouble is finding someone who still cares even after the mask has slipped to the floor.
It is in that context that this James Fallows post ought to be considered. Mostly it’s a thoughtful e-mail Fallows got about privacy in the age of Facebook and Google, when anything you type into a keyboard or save to your computer can come back to haunt you. (The discussion began with the goofy Dave Weigel/Washington Post thing.) What struck me was this:
My existence on the internet might be with my real name, but my suspicion is that the vast majority of people are creating Avatars of themselves on the internet, untagging Facebook photos and writing blog posts to fit the image they wish to project.
Bingo. Today, in 2010, we’re smack dab in the middle of a transition from a culture that didn’t have an on-line component into one that does. Really large numbers of people have been going on-line to interact with other people for only about fifteen years, and even over that relatively short amount of time nearly everything about how people do so has changed.
Five years ago Facebook was for college kids, now it’s ubiquitous. Or is it? Tens of millions of Americans don’t have Facebook accounts, and many never will. Not because they’re too old or too disconnected, but simply because they don’t want one. No part of on-line interaction is (yet) mandatory; you get to choose not only what to present, but how to present it.
The result is a great big natural experiment in which the previous rules of discretion, decent behavior, and so on have been upended. But even on-line, Chris Rock’s observation about our “representatives” holds true. Quite naturally, we tend to minimize our shortcomings (perceived and real) and maximize our strengths (again, perceived and real) when presenting ourselves to others, and the internet allows enormous variety in how one chooses to do that (Tethered Swimming included, shudder).
When and where things will be allowed to slide, and when and where things must be taken seriously, has not yet been worked out. Fallows’ anonymous correspondent concludes with, “We still need a paperless way to be formal” and that is absolutely true. On-line, the boundaries between work and personal, formal and informal are easily subverted, and the notions of which set of guidelines applies in which circumstances are still very much up in the air.
We haven’t worked out what the adult rules for on-line discourse are because we just haven’t had enough time. In the interim, the experiment will continue. Privacy? We’ll find some way to maintain enough to let us all feel human, if maybe in a different way than before. Decorum? Sure, but maybe not in as many places as before. Hiding the warts and crafting a representation that we think people will like a little better than the real thing? That’s as old as the hills and nothing we’ve invented has shown any signs of stopping it. It’s a great big digital adolescence, and none of us are older than fifteen.
