Social Networking and the Effects on Persona
The ongoing rise of Internet-mediated social networking is encouraging millions of people to increase their interaction with other people for many reasons, including pleasure, the chance to rekindle old friendships, reaching out to distant relations, curiosity, enhancement of career and much more. It’s likely that each person who participates in social networking is doing so for multiple reasons, and also likely to use different social media services to satisfy each particular motivation. LinkedIn, for example, satisfies career-related motivations, Facebook for friends/family, Twitter for the sense of community and so on. To various extents, these services encourage different amounts and types of contributions from participants. Twitter is more real-time and focussed, while Facebook can be more contemplative. Needless to say that each service is trying to get some of the action of its competitors, so there’s quite a blurring of the edges, but in conversation with colleagues and friends I get the strong impression that they perceive the various social network channels as compartmental, related to their motivation for participation.
I believe this may be creating an interesting, and not altogether positive, effect on the way people perceive themselves. There is a certain level of intentional filtering taking place, to ensure that the expressions presented to each social network are in keeping with the perceived nature of that network. For example, LinkedIn is specifically a medium for commercial and career-oriented interaction, so there is little (if any) informal dialogue, certainly nothing personal or overtly political. This is because we have a filter for such networks that identifies certain communication as being irrelevant to the purpose, distracting from the objectives or damaging to future activity. For trivial networking, the real-time instant messaging (and particularly the broadcast variety) fits better. Here we filter according to what will draw immediate attention, but without any feeling of being prepared to discuss the topics in any great depth. (This applies mainly to individuals, and contrasts with the likes of news sources who want to attract you to alternative media – mainly their Web sites – where in-depth discussion is encouraged, especially if they can intersperse that with an abundance of advertising.)
We create a persona to match the social network in which we are engaging. And since there are so many such networks within the Internet, many of us are compelled to create multiple personae. So do any of these resemble the “real you”? Was there ever a single persona, or is social networking simply reflecting the fact that we are each in fact multiple personae? It will be years before we see the long-term effects of social networking, but apart from the commercial, political, educational and entertainment effects, we should keep an eye on the psychological.
Categorised as: LUE