MSTU4020: Identity: Relating the Self to the Social

I am so delighted that this time we are going to talk about our identities and  relationships to the social online.

Two weeks ago, I set down a question mark beside a line of an article in Session 3 and did the same in another article last week. I just let them alone until I read articles for this session and happen to find that both of them have something to do with this week's topic.

Let me first quote those lines from former readings for you.

Quotes:

• "Good user interface design produces accessible and universally usable applications that enable solitary reading or social interactions that meet the needs of diverse user populations (Rainie and Tancer, 2007)."

     ——Preece, J. & Shneiderman, B. (2009). The reader-to-leader framework: motivating technology-mediated social participation. AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(1), pp. 16

• "Sharing alone is a way of interacting in social media, but whether sharing leads users to want to converse or even build relationships with each other depends on the functional objective of the social media platform."

     ——Kietzman, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons, 54(3), 245

When I came across with these descriptions, I wondered why such an oxymoron could be possible. How do people really feel while they are networking online? And more importantly, how will they feel after that?

With new technology being released everyday and adverts bombarding us with the need to be able to do more with less, multitasking, and multhiple-use devices, Sherry Turkle worries that we may gradually lose serenity and joy while being alone, thinking in depth, or communicating with a friend face to face. As for me, I do prefer text messages to voice calls or meetings in person due to the sense of control that Turkle mentioned. There will be hardly anything out of expectations if you have a text-based communication. We will never be embarrassed and can always maintain a perfect image of ourselves though it may cost us more energy and time to do so, e.g. check a post over and over again before sending it to show a feeling of relax...(enjoy the funny video below ^-^ ).

Taking Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and etc. as mediators for our communication, we defamiliarize this most common daily process and regard it seriously as a job that should be done. When every post and communication is given as a formal presentation, we are certainly more likely to gain a sense of so-called "self-esteem", which is also suggested by Amy L. Gonzales's research.

However, this short-term satisfaction is accompanied by intermittent anxiety in the long run. Being addicted to a made-perfect self in the virtual world, we might well be more afraid of appearing clumsy in the flesh. The underlying logic here is that I love my identity online so that I love those people who know me as my identity online, and therefore I would rather spend more time with those loved ones who might also enjoy being admired of their online identities by my online identity. In brief, we are obsessed with the delicate and "perfect" world we designed while gradually shrink from the "imperfect" world we live.

It sounds horrible, but is it really a problem? We should admit that human beings change over time. What looks weird today might be commonplace in the future. Is it possible that one day everyone just live as a separate unit surrounding by different equipment? Perhaps, ties among people provided through those devices, whether strong or weak, are already adequate for an individual. That humans are social animals can also be a fallible hypothesis.

Once we lived close to each other because we had to fight against the cruel environment with joint efforts. After that period of time, our domain were extended from a village to a country, from a state to around the world. Despite that it was unimaginable that someone would work tens of thousand kilometers away from his/her home hundreds of years ago, it is trivia nowadays. It was the first time that the blood tie was let go. Moreover, increasing number of people tend to be single, which reveals to some extent that the tie of marriage is let go as well. Simply, the fact is we become more and more independent. As more tasks can be handled by only one person with the assist of high-tech machines, there are reasons to believe that humans may deliberately try to get rid of those heavy relationships when they feel that they are powerful enough to face the world.

Don't be so worried. It is just the trajectory of human history. Instead of withdrawing back from industrial age to agricultural age, we entering the age of electricity. There is no doubt that we lose a lot of unsophisticated and beautiful things during that progress, but humans hate to walk backwards and thus they are expenses that we should take in order to step forward to the next era, whether good or not.