Guest post: I and Thou and Life in Aspergerstan

I have a new guest post up at ribbonfarm, which turned out to be a conceptual salad of Martin Buber, cognitive psychology, the culture of Asperger's, and social media. As J.R. "Bob" Dobbs says, too much is always better than not enough.

Self-branding

[[I'm doing some housecleaning on the blog; this is a draft from over a year ago that I never got around to releasing]]

Here's a chunk I edited out of the Personae post, because it seemed a wee bit self-pitying:

The people who seem to thrive in this culture are those who are full-time extroverts, the kind of people who have constructed a persona for a particular purpose and/or audience and live it out 24/7. San Francisco is full of people like that, but I'm not one of them.

But danah boyd has a good rant on Facebook, in which she made essentially the same point and introduced a good term of art:

With this backdrop in mind, I want to talk about a concept that Kirkpatrick suggests is core to Facebook: radical transparency. In short, Kirkpatrick argues that Zuckerberg believes that people will be better off if they make themselves transparent. Not only that, society will be better off... if people make themselves transparent. And given his trajectory, he probably believes that more and more people want to expose themselves. Silicon Valley is filled with people engaged in self-branding, making a name for themselves by being exhibitionists. It doesn'™t surprise me that Scoble wants to expose himself; he is always the first to engage in a mass collection on social network sites, happy to be more-public-than-thou. Sometimes, too public. But that i™s his choice. The problem is that not everyone wants to be along for the ride.

Of course, she is a consummate self-brander and I am not, so even if we are saying the same thing, it ends up in quite different speech acts.

Personally, I hate being labeled and classified, it always seems limiting. This is a constant irritation, for example when recruiters ask me if I'm a front-end or back-end engineer (or even worse, a "Javascript engineer"). Fuck that, I'm an across-the-board engineer (or better, a software designer, at least that's what I aspire to), and just about everything I've built involves jointly created front- and back-end work. But that doesn't help them slot me into the slots they are trying to fill.

This shouldn't get my hackles up. People need to know what role you are playing if they are to interact with you. I often feel my attitude is some kind of leftover sixties romanticism, a belief that everyone drop their masks and interact authentically...which is a rather childish belief, but persists somewhere down in my subconscious.

For similar reasons I've never been able to fully adopt a political, philosophical, or religious belief system either. All my lame efforts at spiritual writing, for instance, comes from being unable to identify with any religion, but being almost equally repulsed by the smug scientific atheists. I am trying to find a truth that is not this, not that, because all the interesting things seems to lie in the lightly-settled borderlands between existing fields and existing systems.

During my time in academia, I was in a lab at MIT that was founded to be more interdisciplinary than the old AI lab (which was originally an interdisciplinary place, but was in the process of congealing into a settled discipline of its own around my time), and while there I managed to help invent a new subfield that was even more interdisciplinary than that. But I didn't manage to turn that into an intellectual home, so went on to other things. At some point the urge to be interdisciplinary starts to look like active resistance to discipline.

Or maybe it's just GrouchoMarxism: I don't care to belong to any club that will accept people like me as members. Anyway, for whatever reason, my thoughts and interests seem to actively resist categorization. Which I like to believe helps keeps them honest, fresh, original, and alive, but also makes them damn hard to describe to anyone else, let alone be stamped with a brand and put out into the marketplace.

[[Realized after posting that self-branding literally means "searing a symbol into your own flesh".]]

Performing Ourselves

Sherry Turkle was on the Colbert show a few nights back, plugging her new book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. I'll reserve judgement on the book -- you really can't summarize any sort of serious thesis in that context, and I have to say you have to be pretty brave to go up against Colbert. But I found one remark jarring: she complained that "people are performing on a Facebook profile...adolescents suffer from performance exhaustion". I immediately thought about Erving Goffman, who pointed out that performance is characteristic of all social interaction. And Colbert called her on it as well, presumably without the benefit of a deep knowledge of sociology.

I don't know if it's marketing or something else, but pop-tech books all seem to get slotted into the "tech is going to make us unto gods" or "tech is killing our souls" buckets. I'm pretty sure Turkle's work is more subtle than that, but she certainly seems to fall in the latter category here. Other recent entrants in this genre include Jaron Lanier (reviewed here), Andrew Keen, and Nicholas Carr. I find this irritating and simplistic. Why do the effects of technology have to be good or bad? Can't they simply be different?

So, what is it about the performance aspect of Facebook that might be objectionable? Well, for one thing, it's a much less subtle, less rich medium than face-to-face communication. F2F performances can be improvised, adjusted to situations, respond to the performances of others in an intricate dance. Performing on Facebook or Twitter is by contrast a rather crude affair (for instance, there's no analog for eye contact), which tends to degenerate into trivia and naked self-advertisement. You have far less control over context -- most of the problems with Facebook seem to revolve around how it collapses social contexts into a formless blob, resulting either in embarassment (if you allow stuff to escape from its proper context) or repression (if you limit yourself to interaction that is appropriate for every possible audience)*. This however is not a new problem:

Socrates: Writing, you know, Phaedrus, has this strange quality about it, which makes it really like painting: the painter's products stand before us quite as though they were alive; but if you question them, they maintain a solemn silence. So, too, with written words: you might think they spoke as though they made sense, but if you ask them anything about what they are saying, if you wish an explanation, they go on telling you the same thing, over and over forever. Once a thing is put in writing, it rolls about all over the place, falling into the hands of those who have no concern with it just as easily as under the notice of those who comprehend; it has no notion of whom to address or whom to avoid. And when it is ill-treated or abused as illegitimate, it always needs its father to help it, being quite unable to protect or help itself.

Facebook and Twitter identities are a strange mix of oral and written communication styles. Frankly, it's way too early in the evolution of digital social networks, or whatever you want to call them, to say what they are ultimately going to do to our souls.

I give Turkle a lot of credit for being one of first humanist-type people to take the sociology of digital technology seriously. Now of course that's a whole industry, but she has been at it for decades. Unfortunately, getting old in this world may mean you can't keep current with what the kids are up to these days (as a youngish greybeard myself I am acutely aware of this problem). I'm pretty sure that the critics are right and the displacement of traditional media by the digital world entails the loss of some valuable things. But obviously it also creates a great many new and wonderful things, most of which have yet to be invented. The human soul and persona will adapt to them as it always does.

*[update: this was written before Google+ Circles came along to "solve" this problem. Why that don't actually seem to help will have to be a topic for another post.]

Distracted from distraction by distraction

The weird thing is that this struck me as an excellent image of social media even before I read to the last line:

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Personæ

My friend Amy Bruckman has been talking about her failed attempts to maintain separate online personalities for her personal and professional lives. Me too. I have a very vague and gauzy separation of the different facets of my online life, and those from my real life one. (see here also, and look, it's in the NY Times today).

It got me thinking about how I'd like to divide up my online life, assuming I had infinite time to maintain separate masks to different parts of the world:

- personal life: family, friends, real-world activities
- work life: computation, biology, hacking, the internet, business
- intellectual life: thoughts on economics, history, philosophy, polticial science, and other fields I take an amateur's interest in
- cultural life: books, movies, music, etc
- spiritual life: the deepest longings of the soul

Each of these spheres defines a separate imaginary audience, has separate conventions and separate rules for what constitutes an interesting or acceptable interaction. But the boundaries are blurry, the categories collapse into each other (and in some cases could be subdivided further). I can't keep these separate, yet they don't really fit together. I feel like my real self is something like the union of these sets, but discretion indicates I should only post material that is in the intersection of them, which is pretty close to empty.

Of course, the real irony is that the only reason to have a blog is to scream to the world, "me, me, look at me, I'm so interesting, I'm so great". If so, what's the point of hiding yourself behind a set of masks? But you could say something similar about human communication in general. We are always putting on a mask, staging an act, constructing a persona. The difference is that in the physical world we can use the structure of the physical environment to manage and cue the different roles we play.

The great sociologist Erving Goffman wrote a great deal about the techniques people use to stage their public life, in books like Interaction Ritual and The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. For example, he talks about the distinction between front and back regions, based on the areas within theater. On stage, a certain performance takes place, back stage the artifice is relaxed, but other types of performance take place. Goffman identifies similar structures in work life, for example, a medical office, where certain rules of conduct apply in areas where patients are, and others where doctors and staff congregate behind the scenes (or a the seating area and kitchen of a restaurant, to take an even clearer example).

Goffman talks about how different roles are played out in different contexts and how the tension between front and back areas is exploited by (for example) shills, who are members of the team putting on a performance who pretend to be members of the audience to channel energies of the actual audience memebers. In the land of the internet, shills are sometimes called sock puppets, which doesn't quite capture the institutionalization of such activity as found in casinos and elsewhere. Lee Siegel got mocked and fired for his sock-puppetry (although he hasn't lost his pundit licensesince he still publishes thumbsucker books and essays in the NY Times), but could he plausibly claim that he was just giving vent to the separate personas that we all have. Would the offense have been the same if the New Republic hired an intern to post enthusiastic comments on his blog (eg, if there was a real separate person performing the role)?

The Internet erases all boundaries and cueing strategies, and as more social life is conducted through social media it is harder to know how to act. Are we onstage or backstage, and what is the nature of the show we are in? Random bits of banter that people exchange as teenagers come back to haunt them as adults, in job applications or other formalized situations. The deep structure of social life is dissolved; we're left putting on an act without knowing who it's for; whether at any particular time its supposed to be serious or funny, formal or informal.

The old-school internet didn't have these problems. "Social media" consisted of email lists; the archives of such things were generally private, and it was no problem to present one face to a list concerned with knowlege representation and another that dealt with anarcho-surrealist art, if those happened to be two of your interests. The advent of Google and Facebook has changed that. Is this some kind of unstoppable dynamic, sort of like how global capitalism flattens boundaries and winds up with everybody connected and competing? Or will there be a reaction, with people withdrawing and figuring out ways to put boundaries around parts of their lives?

Just in the last few weeks, Facebook has been subject to severe criticism for its increasingly cavalier approach to privacy. Durkheim (via Goffman) sums up why:

The human personality is a sacred thing; one does not violate it nor infringe its bounds, while at the same time the greatest good is in communion with others.

Goffman's work partly undermines this idea. In his detailed descriptions of social interaction, the persona is a carefully forged tool for getting a job done, a construct, a mask. The sacred part is hidden inside somewhere, occasionally shining through, protected by the concentric boundaries of social space. Because Facebook and other social media blithely destroy these boundaries, they are in effect desecrators.

[update: found an academic treatment of this problem: The problem of conflicting social spheres: effects of network structure on experienced tension in social network sites, by Jens Binder et al]

It's who you know

Social networking applications for the real world.

(tnx Ken)