Alex Wright

Between the cracks

April 5, 2006

Nadav has a thoughtful post on how people project their identities in the so-called "behavior economy":

[W]e have to find ways of inserting our personality into the cracks of the data structures (the tags we use, our AIM status messages and so on). But, despite this so-beautifully human resistance to dehumanization, we increasingly experience each other through the “voice” of our online behavior. That sounds about right to me. Personally, I seem to have a lot of resistance to spreading my own "voice" across these channels. I almost never use AIM, I don't flickr, I'm an incorrigible listserv lurker, hell I don't even have blog comments turned on. It's not that I have a problem with any of these things in principle. In fact, I spend a lot of time out there taking in other people's "voices," and I enjoy seeing how people play with their digitally constructed selves. Yet I rarely let my own identity seep out beyond this little 800 pixel corner of the docuverse. Somehow I find the whole prospect vaguely threatening.

Maybe I have anti-social tendencies, maybe I'm just a private person, or maybe I'm clinging neurotically to the delusion of a solid self. So to answer Nadav's question, I guess my "brand experience" is introversion.

File under: Informatics

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