How accurately do we represent ourselves online?

Social networking is not just a way to keep in touch with people you already know; it's a way to get to know new people. Sometimes this meeting is entirely electronic and sometimes it might mean looking someone up on Facebook who you recently met in real life.

This has consequences as employers and educators look at Internet profiles to learn more about potential employees and students.

Many might argue that their Facebook profile does not accurately represent them and shouldn't be used by a potential employer to judge character or personality.

So how well do these profiles express who we are?

That's the question the research project called "You just get me" asks.

It is a social networking experiment that assesses how similar or different our opinions of our personalities are from strangers viewing a self-generated profile on the Internet.

This is an interesting question. In Crossing Boundaries: Identity Management and Student/Faculty Relationships on the Facebook Georgia Institute of Technology researchers Hewitt and Forte found many students didn't think professors should be on Facebook:

One student noted that the Facebook “can unfairly skew a
professor's perception of a student in a student environment,”
which indicates that she perceives the Facebook as a place that is “owned” by students as a group.

Offhand, I might agree with her. The majority of photos of me on the website were posted by my peers; photos which are usually unflattering and demonstrate a far higher amount of inebriation than is representative of my time in college.

Youjustgetme.com doesn't test for the influence of a community photo album, but it does demonstrate that for the most part, our Internet profiles pretty accurately describe the way we view ourselves.

You must create a profile to view the results or you can view a summary in Joe McCarthy's blog, Gumption.

I may be misrepresenting myself or possess an inaccurate view of my personality, because my profile is receiving evaluations with consistently low accuracy. It would seem people think I am far more organized and conservative than I believe myself to be.

According to the study, it might be because I'm a guy. Women consistently scored higher both in ability to evaluate others' profiles accurately and creating profiles that are evaluated accurately.

Or maybe I just don't want to admit I'm a dirty hippie.

-Robot Crusoe

Footprints in Cyberspace

All eyes are on Google as a court order to hand over personal information on its users has many concerned about privacy infringement.

Viacom claims that the data is necessary to the 1 billion dollar copyright infringement case against Youtube (a company owned by Google.)

This begs the question as to why Google was holding on to the data in the first place; which couldn't be compromised via court order if it wasn't stored.

Orin Huirvitz discusses and criticizes Google's privacy policy here.

As we streamline media use and integrate it with social networking; we leave a larger and more precise footprint in cyberspace.

One of the inherent advantages of the Internet; being able to track and quantify everything; becomes an issue of privacy.

Everything we look at and even how long we look at it can be tracked to the second. A company called Tacoda even tracks where your mouse goes on a given website. (If you want to opt-out of their data collection you can choose to do so here.)

User privacy is a big deal; I remember when AOL made user data available to the public...for no reason.

As legislators, judges, and lawyers sort through everything, it is probably worth your time to carefully read the statement of user privacy the next time you sign up for anything online.

-Robot Crusoe

Social Singularity

Much has been said about the so called "technological singularity."

The term, coined by mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge, refers to a proposed point in the future when intelligent machines will be able to make themselves more intelligent; setting off a cycle of recursive augmentation resulting in intelligences beyond human comprehension.

While there is healthy debate about the validity of this theory, I think there is something to be said for the obvious and accelerating changes in our day to day lives; especially on the social level.

For instance, I find my frequent personal interaction to be less and less defined by proxemics.

This was painfully obvious to me recently when my neighbors upstairs threw a rowdy rendez-vous. I won't go into too many details, but I did end up chasing a nascent fraternity slob out of the building when he urinated on my door. I ran upstairs to demand satisfaction from my neighbors, and confronted with a hedonistic mob, could not identify who actually lived in the apartment and who had just dropped in for debauchery.

I regularly correspond with friends half a world away and I had never spoken with the people living on the other side of my ceiling.

I must not be the only person to observe this phenomena; now there's a website for people who want to meet their neighbors on-line instead of meeting them in real life.

Meettheneighbors.org provides a free homepage for neighbors to communicate, organize, and (hopefully) avoid unfortunate urination.

This blog will address the more human aspect of accelerating returns, specifically in terms of social networking and how it is changing and will change human interaction through the next century.

I am interested not only in websites that categorize themselves as "social networks," Facebook , Myspace and the like; but any aspect of electronic communication that is changing or could change the way we interact with each other.

Before I regularly used a text messaging service on my cell phone, I was appalled to see people one-thumbing as they barrelled down the highway.

Now I admit I've occasionally squeezed off a, "Be there in two minutes!" while merging. (My obstinate refusal to use text message abbreviations probably makes this even more dangerous.)

Wherever all of this technology is leading us, we're heading there quickly and getting faster.

Many of my posts will come from personal observation and I in no way intend to represent myself as an expert on anything; I am merely an observer embedded in this rapidly unfolding and increasingly complex social fabric.

When possible I will link to reputable research and scientific inquiry; unless cited or linked, I'm pulling it all out of my blog.

-Robot Crusoe