Internet Profiling

I was in one of my classes the other day to, you know, to break up the monotony of being physically in class. One of the main themes we talked about, on the subject of memoirs, was self representation. In the terms of the internet, self representation takes on a whole new dynamic. There's a drastic change between representation and reality in some communities, like with furries. (If anyone isn't familiar with what a 'furry' is, take the safe search off and Google 'yiff'. Be amazed at the capacity of the human imagination.) But even the majority of users (and therefore the majority of people) realize that 'webpresentation has become very close to a real life representation. People get up, dress for the day, and check their email. Throughout the day, like someone checking their hair in a mirror, people check their Facebook pages. I have friends that police the activity of Friends on their Facebook page because a bad Facebook associations are just as bad as having real life delinquent friends. In this way, you could say that the internet has given people just another way to represent themselves in the present, their virtual life in parallel to their real life.

There's a strange flip side to this though. Online profiles and the ilk behave a little differently than real life representations. Unlike casual associations, where people drift apart and forget, the online world remains pristinely static. For instance, if you were to ask old high school acquaintances what they thought about me, you'd probably get a short description of poorly timelined events... maybe even some rumors if you were lucky; I wasn't ever someone that noticeable or popular. However, my old high-school LiveJournal is still exactly how I left it. All the things that fade in the memory of people are preserved in perfect stasis (until I eventually get uneasy and delete them, as I'm sure I'll need to do one day when I go job hunting).

The reason I'll probably have to delete them though is another disconnect: while these self representations are all brutally honest (There's basically one one thing that I never mention in any of them), these perfect copies of frames in time are often outdated! Self representation online makes itself difficult when you look at honest representations that are now disingenuous as they are dated but presented in the present tense. No where on my LifeJournal is written a preface that says "This is me 10 years ago, and here's some context that relates it to today." If you didn't pay attention to the dates, you'd think I was still a 15 year old angst riddled boy living at home and swimming at ungodly hours each morning. This makes online profiles of any sort almost parodies of real life if they aren't properly maintained. Casual profiles made on whim stand just as strongly, shouting to the hills your words at that moment just as strongly six months or two years later. Text on a page doesn't fade. The passion and even the state of mind you write in it doesn't fade off web pages, it doesn't turn yellow and brittle either. Self representations online are so perfectly enduring that they often surprise even ourselves when we find them later.

Online representations are often like memoirs in that they allow us to portray ourselves through thought and words, but they are also distinctly different in that they're more alike to scribbles on scraps of indestructible paper than a formal published book. I was just thinking that today.