August 21, 2007

• perception management

  I recall reading or hearing not long ago about a concept called “personal identity management” which is sort of a individualized kind of “brand management” particularly relevant today when considering how quickly information about ourselves can propagate through the internet. The basic idea is that you should sort of think of your identity as a kind of precious commodity that you have to protect.

  Really, I think this is all really apart of a much larger concept that is nothing new at all. I like to call it perception management. Basically it is the idea that people are concerned a great deal with how people perceive things and there is a great interest people have in ensuring that people perceive things a certain way and more importantly don’t perceive things in a negative light.

  So of course in the real world people expend all kinds of effort worrying about how they dress and how they look and how they carry themselves, and what kind of car they drive, what kind of house they live in all in an effort to create a kind of perception of themselves. People also expend enormous amounts of effort watching what they say in order to manage the perceptions of the people they interact with.

  Conceptually you would assume that the internet would be no different right? People would watch very carefully what they say online, what details about themselves they share, how they interact with people in the online world, what kinds of site they hang out on etc.   And for the most part, this is exactly what the “personal identity management” idea and all like rants about secrecy and privacy on the internet are about. They are advocating that you should be just as careful with keeping track of how others perceive your online identity as you are with keeping track of how they perceive your real life identity.

  Wait a minute. Advocating?  Why should there be a need to advocate this idea? Why does it seem as if some commentators are downright begging their audience to exercise more caution on the internet? It’s entirely normal behavior right? Wouldn’t everyone already be doing it?

  The answer is clearly, remarkably, and I think extraordinarily not. People on the internet are exceedingly less image conscious, less careful and cautious, less deceptive and manipulative, and more honest with respect to their online identity than they are with respect to their real life identity. The real hard core scholars amongst us will ask the question “why should that be?” and they will expend endless hours and mind numbing research to come up with some explanation probably having to do with the illusion of anonymity that the internet provides and basically assuming that people are just dupes too stupid to realize that for the most part their identity is wide open out there for anyone sufficiently determined to see no matter what trivial steps they take to secure it.

  I don’t believe that at all. People are well aware that they are not anonymous. In fact they thrive on it. So then is the answer that they are getting ego benefits, notoriety and fame from their exposure? If that were the case, why are we  so less candid in real life. How many people publish their personal diaries to local news papers? How many people post images that they like and images of themselves outside their door and all over their cars and anywhere where strangers can see them? No. People carefully manage the way people perceive them in the real world, sharing the minimum needed to create a perception that they can control, but they don’t or at least don’t yet exercise the same caution online. Why?

  Really, truly, I don’t even care what the answer is to that question. I just think it’s awesome. But if I’d hazard a guess I’d say that maybe the issue isn’t that we are unusually forthcoming and un-self conscious in the online world but rather that maybe we are unusually reserved, indirect, and deceptive in the rest of our lives. There are a lot of social causes that may have lead us to be that way, but the argument would go that the internet provides people with an escape from those norms, an opportunity to be more truthful without feeling like an outsider.

  My concern though is not with the question of why is it one way here and another way there. That seriously doesn’t matter to me at all. My concern is should it be that way anywhere? Are we justified in putting so much concern and energy in trying to manage how others perceive us? Should we really care? For some reason for me it just always seemed just a little bit too deceptive for my taste. But deception can be moral, immoral, or amoral depending on the circumstances so we still need to ask the questions. Are we justified in managing our perceptions? Is it good for us to manage our perceptions?

  I recently saw a few episodes of a television show and it wasn’t particularly interesting to me except for one side plot where basically there was a child who acting in extremely unusual ways. The mother of the child was extremely worried that the child’s actions were so odd that they could be considered “psychopathic” and was basically freaking out. The mother obviously didn’t think her child was a “pyschopath” rather she was concerned about the perception others were having about both her child and herself as a mother. She was trying to solve the problem as a means of a perception management. She was trying to avoid having people think she was a bad mother or that her child was crazy. This is not really selfish or even entirely self-interested thinking on the mother’s part. Rather, the need to manage perceptions is so important in the world we interact in right now that the mother’s desire to avoid unusual perceptions can be said to have been rational interest in the child’s long term welfare. The child could be impacted severely in terms of opportunities for success and welfare and even possibly happiness if she was perceived too be too far on the crazy side by her peers and society.

  And yet to me the child was the hero of the story. She did what she wanted and ignored the perceptions of others around her and lived exactly as she wanted. And although the few episodes I saw was insufficient to determine how the child would turn out, since I can’t see as how the child was causing any real long term harm, I could see no wrong in living one’s life that way. So to me then, if society causes some harm to the child who lives in such a manner, all practical considerations aside, should the child really be considered to blame for nonconformity? Or should we judge the society as lacking for not finding a place for her?

  Whatever ultimate conclusions we draw about the morality of it, perception management has always seemed to me to have a dark side and as I see it spread and gain traction in the online world I see that dark side rearing its ugly head again and again.  It always seemed to me through observation of myself and of others that the more engrossed we get in the management of how people perceive us, the smaller we seem to grow as people.

  What I mean is this, take a simple example where you interact with your parents in a certain way and then you interact with your friends in a different way. You are careful not to share certain aspects of yourself with your friends and you are careful not to share certain other aspects of yourself with your parents. And then you add your coworkers who you want to see a different side of you, or other strangers you interact with to see a different component of your nature as well. And your siblings, potential mates, superiors, clients, constituents,  subordinates, authority figures, etc. etc.

  But as always there are collisions, sometimes you are interacting with your parents and your friends at the same time so in such cases there are choices to be made. You can choose to show all aspects of yourself that you show to your friends to your parents and all aspects of yourself that you show to your parents to your friends, or you can choose to show only those aspects of yourself that are consistent to both groups image of you. Most often people seem to choose the later.

  What’s more over time it seems that the more you interact with more people the more of yourself you need to suppress in order to remain the common denominator of yourself that can co-exist in all of the various social venues in which you interact. Eventually it becomes habit and soon you don’t even remember that there were was in which you interacted with the world that might not been seen as acceptable to one or more of the people with whom you interact.

  I think of this as a kind of process of moving outside of yourself and looking upon yourself as if you were a bush in a great garden of other human beings. And you kind of prune yourself bit by bit, cutting off components of who you are so that you fit in better with the rest of the garden, so that the whole think makes a nicer more pleasant overall image. And everyone else is doing the same so that in the end you have a nice orderly garden of plants all growing cleanly within the confines of their expected places. The only thing is, I can’t help but wonder at all the pieces of self people had to discard in order to get there.

  And I see that starting to happen on the internet too. People just keep getting smaller and smaller. Even as technology enhances to allow people to share more and more they are also becoming more and more careful about who sees what and when. People are starting to be greatly concerned about how others are perceiving their online persona. And as a result when in doubt they simply choose to leave data out of the databases that house the online reflection of themselves or even just opt out of the process of posting any information about themselves altogether. And so their online presence grows smaller and smaller, less and less. The internet you becomes less and less you altogether, and more of a shell of the few most pleasant details of yourself that you wouldn’t mind anyone learning.

  Whatever the benefits I think this cost is too great. It detracts from the extraordinary capacity of the internet to unify us as a people by exposing how fundamentally similar we all are in the areas that really matter. The internet could turn out to be just a mirror image reflection of the real world where everyone perpetually insulates themselves in order to be able to carefully control how others perceive them, or it could become something more. Something unique. A world in which people just are who they are and don’t give a damn about what anyone who happens by happens to think.

  I want the internet to be this way so more and more I try to be less secretive on the internet. More and more I try not to care about who is perceiving what about me and what the might think and why they might think it. In the real world too, I’ve always tried to empty my mind of concerns of conformity and concern about how others think. I fail miserably of course. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of letting yourself shrink to fit in, and so much easier to let yourself be less than deal with the consequences of having everyone else know that you are more. Still, I feel it is worth the effort and I’ll never stop.

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  As an aside it occurs to me that a truly anonymous internet would really create a unique instance where people could for the most part preserve their perception management in the offline world while still being able to be virtually completely revealing in the online world. Just as long as a person doesn’t reveal information that would enable them to be identified there would never be any consequences of what they said on their real life persona. No one could deny you a job for example because of something you wrote on your blog, or if you are a politican you couldn’t get in trouble with your constituents  over something on your myspace.

  Indeed in a truly anonymous internet, even breaches of personal security do not necessarily have long term consequences provided you can find out about it. If you accidentally reveal your home address for online identity A, you can simply create an online identity B which no one can ever link to A to figure out that B’s address is also A’s.

  Better yet have an anonymous internet with a lousy memory too. So that personal identity A’s revelation of his or her address disappears after a couple of weeks or maybe even days never to be seen again unless the controller of personal identity A and B decides that it is something important worth keeping. And of course said controller can at any time change their mind and *permanently* erase wherever they asserted their address and that change would be propagated throughout the entire network.

  But alas all that’s just random wishful thinking. I doubt we will ever be free of the cursed IP addresses that plague our online lives.

  • 7:42 pm
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