Characters

The expanding prevalance of social software makes me distinctly uncomfortable. I can't put into words exactly what I fear will happen, but there is something about the opportunity to manufacture and maintain a personality for oneself that I feel could affect society in unforseen and possibly adverse ways.

While I was initially resistant to social software devices, such as AIM and Facebook, they eventually seduced me. There is a reclamation of power that comes with the process of carefully controlling an image of oneself that will be disseminated to one's peers. On AIM I can take a few moments to run over possible witty responses and decide on the wittiest. I can actively decide whether I want the person I'm talking to to think I'm a jovial type, or a deep intellectual (how succesful I am is certaily questionable, but the process is there.) A Facebook profile is essentially a carefully chosen compilation of information designed to present an image you think will be attractive/endearing/popular/etc. Real tastes aren't even portrayed, let alone real personality.

Again, I'm not sure exactly what bothers me about this. I suppose part of it is that it makes life a little too close to fiction for my taste. I'm creating characters for my final project. These characters need blogs. For blogs they need email addresses. So I got them their own, and as I was doing it and setting up blogs I was thinking, why shouldn't these characters have their own MySpace and Facebook pages, and AIM screen names? Why should anyone ever know that they are just characters at all? What is the importance of that distinction?

Virtual relationships strike me as relationships between characters rather than people. The spontaneity of real time real life interaction is gone. And with that loss goes some of the beauty of life--those moments of connection between people who by all rights should have nothing to do with each other, those unexpected moments when you find you have so much in common with someone totally different than you.