Fashion:
“Fashion is an incredible instrument, because it’s an instant way of saying and seeing things. People in other fields envy the speed of fashion and its ability to capture things, and even if it’s superficial, it’s still telling you something.” (Miuccia Prada, March 2011)
The internet has created a new possibility for fashion: people can test, enquire and be approved virtually before enduring real life consequences of their style. Fashion web blogs are designed for people, willing to be ‘fashionable’ in the virtual world, because in reality they are considered as too ‘extravagant’ or too ‘boring’[1](here you can find varieties of fashion weblogs).This is an example of shifting identity. Women and men of all ages are maintaining double or triple personalities, just to make sure that one of them is going to be accepted and understood by the web and its general perception of fashion. They post various ‘albums’ depicting facets of the personality they want to share. Skyblog, a famous French teenage blog, has mostly webcam pictures of the bloggers. Their statement being: “This is me in my room, my small space of creation which is this blog as well, and you see me in my environment”, giving an image of honesty yet teenage vulnerability.
May this create a problem in the real world? There is no definitive answer, since the border between virtual and real world is becoming less visible. People are free to experiment and to show their personalities using Fashion and Fashion blogs as their main instrument against their own limits and complexes. It is easier to be a fashion Icon in Internet, but it is harder to be yourself, with your short skirt on a rainy, working day.
This is the most common search for the question “How can I…” on Google. Humour is personal, but when everyone is linked through the World Wide Web, is there such a thing as universal humour? Maybe globalisation started to lead the path with humour in Hollywood movies and developed a main stream humour. It’s not a coincidence that Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey are in summer comedy blockbusters but what humour trends develop when the whole world is interconnected. Imagine this scenario:
“In this environment you can pull any pranks and jokes you want, without consequences” and most people, unless very computer savvy, cannot trace an IP address of the person that pranked them. Some online users, called Trolls, aware of the anonymity that the Internet provides, developed the action of trolling. They post provocative comments on Blogs, forums and discussion boards in order to stimulate an emotional response. In Wikipedia for example, they like to perturb the discussion thread on the Middle Eastern conflict, because it is an on-going sensitive issue. Several reasons can explain this sadistic amusement:
Some psychologists argue that this provocation is a disinhibition caused by anonymity. It can be a way of expressing their dislike to a certain subject or just being rebellious without facing the consequences. Tom Postmes, a Social Psychology professor explains “Trolls aspire to violence, to the level of trouble they can cause in an environment. They want it to kick off. They want to promote antipathetic emotions of disgust and outrage, which morbidly gives them a sense of pleasure.” (Individuality and the Group, 2006). Others say that Trolling is a group behavior that expresses an identity as a part of a group. Indeed, despite working individually, they all identify themselves following their inflammatory post to the “troll face” image. Like Zorro engaged into evil, Trolls use an alias to disrupt communities, leaving a sign without any trace.
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The “troll face” or “cool face” posted after tolling
Judith Donnath was one of the first to document Trolling: “In the physical world there is an inherent unity to the self, for the body provides a compelling and convenient definition of identity. The norm is: one body, one identity ... The virtual world is different. It is composed of information rather than matter” (1990). A troll can inflict long term damage to a virtual community because the users become more suspicious and lose their feeling of trust, which binds the community in the first place. New users who are asking naïve questions will be rejected as trolls and it stops the community from growing. For more see Doctissimo m’a tué (Dictissimo killed me) it is a compilation of the most absurd ones and it is hard to tell real posts from trolls apart…[2]
Username: Myself
Password: Who am I?
Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Dataweb, Twitter, LinkenIn, Classmates.com, SixDegrees.com… are like different religions: have different Gods, but same function. They take up most of our time, know our deepest secrets and dictate the do’s and don’ts of social relations: the main God in our world is called cyber society.
Shifting identities is part of the cyber world; we cannot be the same person on Facebook and the same person in the kitchen, probably because on our profiles we did not indicate our interest in ‘cooking’, neither a picture of ourselves making a dinner. We conceal the boring and post the exciting; few are the ones whose daily life resembles the pictures of parties, travels and private jokes on the Facebook profile bar. And this led to the avoidance of brutal honesty: who ever posted a status saying “I wonder about my social relevance: will anyone ever love me?” this would just make our ‘friends’ feel awkward, probably because this is an intimacy that should not be shared with several hundred acquaintances (see our Facebook experiment). So we substitute it with humor, making the banal funny to feel like we are more realistic: “Just spend an hour on Facebook instead of revising… OOPS!”… But another question is rising; do we have to share everything in the social network, to be called honest and not hypocritical in real life? When so many people are witnesses to our lives, it’s probably better to control what is visible…
Some become dependent on this image they create. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSMIV-4), which helps psychologists and psychiatrists diagnose patients with disorders, is updated every few years and has now included addition to social networks as a disorder. Similar to gambling, some people cannot be deprived from going on social networking sites without side effects like stress and restlessness. The most severe cases concern the online game World of Warcraft.
Cyber Sexuality
With the variety of reading material online about sexuality, religion or ethnicities online, people grow more accustomed and open to new ideas. This gives some individuals the satisfaction to fulfill their desires, which are sometimes scolded in real life, in virtual worlds like Chat Roulette and Chat Rooms. Through these, they don’t need to openly confirm their interests, but can anonymously try and avoid being judged.
People with perversions benefit of their online untraceability to fulfill their desires: the website Chatroulette.com was started in 2009 as a project and by February 2010 had about 35,000 users at one time. Soon a ‘report’ button had to be installed due to R-rated content exposed by people with a voyeur fetish. The people reported are blocked from the web site for up to 24 hours.
A trickier website is the 4-Chan image-board website which has less content regulation. It started in 2003 and has since become one of the biggest cyber communities for computer savvy users. The data posted is untraceable and therefore has issues of child pornography and heavy racism. This website sprouted the idea of the Mastercard hacking operation to support Wikileaks and is a great platform to start internet memes. This online community is so bound that the Washington post has mentioned “the site's users have managed to pull off some of the highest-profile collective actions in the history of the Internet." (Cha, Ariana Eunjung, August 10, 2010).
The experiment:
We have undertaken an experiment on our own Facebook profiles: we noticed that people usual keep a more superficial relation with their Facebook friends despite having some close ones. It has become a public sphere and we wanted to see what response it would stimulate if we posted a status that was brutally honest and rather personal. This is what we each posted.
For Lena, there were no responses. When posting the second post a few days later. One answered in a private post:
"It is part of our culture to not debate personal differences in public. If you feel hurt you talk privately, instead of involving the whole world. People who use Facebook to carry out personal issues in public seem just like people who are shouting to each other on the bus: Everybody is involved, nobody really wants to witness it, and those who are shouting seem kind of stupid"
People do view Facebook as a public sphere, like a bus, a bar or a class room. And in these circumstances people rarely behave like an open book, we follow etiquette. You do not start an argument with your partner in the bus; you stay silent till you're home to then argue.
This shows that cyber communities mirror real communities with regards to social behavior: there are some do's and don'ts and when they are transgressed people do not know how to react.
Incidentally, the similar reaction between online and real world show that we do identify a lot with our Facebook profile, and believe it is quite an accurate depiction of ourselves, how we react and what we say.
The reaction on Svilena`s post was not far off our proven point. However, people replied and commented on the Facebook status. The answers were probably humorous as they felt they suffer from multiple identities as well. Some of the comments were ‘enjoy it don`t suffer’, maybe referring to the shifting happening on Facebook. When asked what the names of their personalities are, people replied that they are not sure if they even have names. The separate identities are not conscious entities but amplifications of certain aspects of our personality.
Some of the reactions were: ‘every day - different name’ we can conclude that in the cyber world you can always be someone else, you are constantly changing and shifting your identity to another level, for good or for bad.
For those who have little chance to ever be in the same room as Obama or Madonna, the virtual world enables the average citizen to get in touch with a notorious figure. The virtual interface does not constitute the same threat, for instance life threat, by a fanatic. Apart from hacking which can reveal defamatory information, a fan or enthusiast can follow a celebrity online in his own time without obstructing the celebrity’s activities. The internet facilitates a society change in hierarchy, where anyone can start a campaign to be heard. Arguably this communication method is more democratic, because the idea will be self-promoted if popular and the generators looks, speech skills or track record is less likely to prevent the idea from spreading on the web.
In 2009, Jon Morter and his wife started a Facebook campaign to protest against Simon Cowell’s parade of X factor winners as the Christmas no. 1 in the charts. They suggested downloading the Rage Against The Machine song “Killing in the Name of” (1992) and his group went viral and eventually won the race. This depicts how a regular couple can provoke the music industry monopoly to get back a Christmas tradition of artists fighting for the No.1 spot.
Similar to Richard Dawkins “memes”, online viral videos are concepts that survive by being transferred from one mind to another. These are popular subjects that every one finds representative and even companies use this to market brands: like the Saab and the supposedly amateur video[3].But when used correctly these messages can bring change: Jamey Rodemeyer was bullied for being gay and committed suicide after leaving a message on Lady Gaga’s Twitter. This lead to awareness about bullying among teenagers and the singer decided to represent the cause nationally[4]. Cyber society allows us to expose a message before exposing ourselves as a person; our physicality can become secondary to our ideologies.
So far we have seen that people shift their image to appear better on social networks, they expand a facet of their personality on sexual networks, they try to get their fashion sense approved and they test the boundaries of reckless humour, but our personality can be shaped by as well. Our pictures can be used in other contexts or modified (see B.Obama and J. Cameron picture) to make a new message and this is one of the main threats of cyber societies: not only can we shift, but we can be shifted as well.
Avatar?
What is the future of our human identities? Is it really possible that we will live in two parallel worlds? Or worse: if Internet is constantly perfecting its environment (more legislation, storage space, programs, user friendliness…) and psychologists are worried of addiction to games and networks now, will some people decide to spend majority of their time as online citizen? This is where Avatars can become real (hint to J. Cameron ‘Avatar’). Maybe we created something we can’t escape and feel complied to perfect, like Facebook that is constantly optimised.
The internet redefined a way of behaving: our main interactions follow a general etiquette (we receive an e-mail so we answer) but we can behave more ruthless with fewer consequences. Like any environment people are not friendly everywhere and if someone is new to it, it can pose some dangers, our naivety or openness can cause damage to our reputation. But cyber societies are not more dangerous than real life, if anything, they’re more reassuring because when we feel threatened we can just turn off the computer.
DELETE….
Sources:
Signature 9, Retrieved October 2011
Doctissimo, Retrieved October 2011
, America`s only humour site since 1958, Retrieved October 2011
Gaga wants to meet with Obama over bullying, 2011 The Assosiation press, Retrieved October ,2011
Washington Post. . Retrieved on 02 October 2011 from
“Click clever, click safe”,, Retrieved on October, 2, 2011 from http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/YoungPeople/HealthAndRelationships/Bullying/DG_184893
Richard Dawkins “the selfish gene”, Retrieved October 2011, from
Morten piano improve chatroulette, Retrieved October 2011, from
Facebook in real life, Retrieved October, 2011, from
