We were having one of those conversations over coffee the other day where there’s a bunch of younger folk who all use Facebook minute by minute and a bunch of not so young folk who have Facebook accounts but don’t really like the idea of posting photographs and other stuff on the internet for all the world to see. It’s true that part of this discomfort is about not really being clear about privacy and the various settings that you can use to protect yourself. It brought to mind a recent BBC podcast I was listening to on the discomfort that many people feel about these invasive – yes, invasive, I think – social networking tools.
The podcast talked about Path (path.com), which allows you to do all the Facebooky type things, but there’s a limit of 50 friends. After listening to the Podcast, I looked at an article by PCmag[1]. This article asked “why 50?” Path chose 50 based on the research of Oxford Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar, “who has long suggested that 150 is the maximum number of social relationships that the human brain can sustain at any given time. Dunbar's research also shows that personal relationships tend to expand in factors of roughly three. So while we may have five people whom we consider to be our closest friends, and 20 whom we maintain regular contact with, 50 is roughly the outer boundary of our personal networks." There is no friending[2] or following on the service, Path says, "just sharing with the people who matter most."
I am not sure I get the arithmetic here – 5, 20, 50 doesn’t look like a geometric progression with a common ratio of anything like 3 – but the principle is pretty cool. It seems, at least, to reflect some sort of reality. When I see my younger daughter on Facebook I will say “so how many friends are on line?”. She will say something like “oh, only 83” and I will wonder how you can handle that sort of interaction. And of course the truth is that you don’t because you can’t. At least not at any level deeper than the superficial.
So what does that say about digital personae? I assume that this is the plural. I did what I always do when I am confronted by a term that I don't understand and that I suspect others don’t understand. I typed it into Chrome and after a couple of companies called digitalpersona I found a site[3] run by a man called Roger Clarke who sounded familiar. And he is; I had read some of Clarke’s stuff on security some years ago. He says on his site that “the digital persona is a model of the individual established through the collection, storage and analysis of data about that person. It is a very useful and even necessary concept for developing an understanding of the behaviour of the new, networked world”. More interestingly he goes on to say “the digital persona is also a potentially threatening, demeaning, and perhaps socially dangerous phenomenon”. Ah, I thought so. But of course he is a security dude and we all know that security dudes create an industry of insecurity.
This sort of confirms my prejudices against getting on-line, or at least getting on line too visibly. I don’t have too much of a problem with people knowing about me but, when I make that statement, the concept of “people” does not include the weirdos that you read about in the more salacious sections of the press. At any rate, all this ramble really says is that I am not naturally pre-disposed to being a digital person. And that is quite apart from the fact that I consider myself to be of the analogue age and therefore analogue in my own right. I do not want to be approximated by a string of bits; I would rather be known as a complete, continuous and physical being.
At the same time we have this push in our organisation for digital eminence. Now, I suppose that I could have a digital persona and not be digitally eminent; I could just be one of a digital crowd, a random sequence of ones and zeroes that doesn’t really amount to anything. But I think these things are somehow different, and each is worrying in its own way.
I reckon that a digital persona is a passively created construct. When you do anything on the network you leave some digital trace of the particular transaction. So, when you buy something Amazon, log into e-Bay or surf around on Facebook you are leaving a digital shadow. All these interactions add up to a digital persona; unless you are really careful about privacy (and most of us I suspect are not) then the digital persona is created without you doing anything. This is the bit that worries me a little because I have very limited, if any, control over retracing my digital steps and backtracking.
Digital eminence, it seems to me, is active. We are told that we need to create a personal brand. We should do this so that when you type “Trevor Moore” into Google or Dogpile (or whatever your search engine of the moment is) you do not get a load of stuff about some second rate American comedian but you get stuff about me, and presumably why I am a wonderful person and a fully paid up member of the human race. Apparently I do this by having blogs and joining LinkedIn and a whole heap of other on-line forums and activities. This is stuff I do deliberately. The question is why should I?
One of the things that bugs me about digital eminence is that it seems to be the sort of thing that would you do if you have an extrovert personality. An introvert personality would go about things in a different way (I don’t know how because I am hardly an introvert). A recent book called Quiet[4] looks at how introverts cope in a world that seems to be built around extroverts. In a way this question is not a new question. It is brought to the fore because communication is quicker and easier today that previously. But if you are a quiet and reflective type being coerced into digital eminence is presumably inconsistent with the way you would prefer to go about things. Of course, I could be wrong and its possible that the virtual world provides people with some sort of anonymity that the real world does not.
I also worry about this concept of brand. I get that a brand relates to a product, something that I can see, feel and touch. A brand reassures me that the quality and utility I got from a product yesterday will be repeated when I buy the product tomorrow. Are human beings that consistent? I don’t think so. I may be reliable (well, most of the time) but I cannot claim to behave exactly the same in similar circumstances at different times. I do not think I am a brand. Saying I have a brand homogenises me in some way that makes me uncomfortable. I want to be an individual.
So, when I reflected on my coffee conversation I realised that I cared rather more about this digital stuff than I realised. A digital persona is not to be taken lightly. It is different to digital eminence. And neither of these concepts is completely welcome in my life.
And there never was anything wrong with being a Luddite!!
[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372690,00.asp, accessed 27 March 2012
[2] I type this word only because it is in the article. I should perhaps have put the word sic in parentheses after it. What is wrong with the verb “to befriend” which seems to mean the same thing and is probably in the dictionary. Clearly Americans. They are always making up words. I remember listening to a presentation once where the speaker suggested that something should be “disincluded”.
[3] http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/DigPersona.html, accessed 28 March 2011
[4] Quiet, Susan Cain; ISBN 978-0-670-91676-4. The subtitle is “The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking”. I have no doubt that Susan Cain has in her head a really good book on this topic which is the one that she meant to write. This one is not that book – it is thin. It falls into the trap that many of these so-called revelatory books fall into as they try to help you cope with who you are. In my view, it makes the mistake that “the world” is the same as the United States. We all know that American behaviour is different to European and certainly to Asian behaviour. The book makes the somewhat dubious claim that the Yanks favour extroversion because they had to travel (or emigrate) to get there (page 29). This ignores the lessons of global history many of which are migratory lessons. There are some other strange things in the book. I would not (page 43) regard Harvard Business School as an exemplar of academia and student behaviour without a comparison elsewhere. The book could be really good and useful. But it turns out to be disappointing, certainly if you aren’t American.
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