I wanted to carry on the discussion of how people create themselves online. There have been several fine blog entries on the subject, and I think it's been fairly well established that people self-consciously create a persona in their interactions with online social networks.

What I find interesting about this is that people often react to this self creation with skepticism. In reading forums for my final project, I have often run across people reacting to others' stories in an interrogative way, looking for holes in the information provided, and going so far as to check the details of the story in real life. For example, in one story that I read (which was admittedly somewhat outlandish), the teller claimed that it had been raining at the time, and provided information on the general area that the events took place in. One skeptical user actually looked up the weather reports for the area and found that it had been clear. However, other less incredulous users pointed out that the skeptic had not gotten the reports for exactly the right area. The whole discussion basically degenerated into an argument about the veracity of the story itself. Some people took the story at face value, and others acted on their doubts with a somewhat creepy zeal.

We’ve done a lot of meta-blogging -- blogging about blogs -- on this site. We’ve blogged about reading blogs; we’ve blogged about writing (or not writing) blogs; we’ve taken lots of different angles on attempted classifications and categorizations of the blog; we’ve talked about the weirdnesses particular to a class blog where credit and grades are involved -- the increased potential for perfectionism, anxiety, self-consciousness, and how these very writer-blocking neuroses are at least in some measure related to the fact that we all have access to a list that attaches names and faces to our blog aliases.

In this post, I want to deal with this class blog in particular, and to do so in a personal and non-theoretical way.

After reading through all the posts I somehow sort of got fixated on the idea of avatars (although I don't really know much about how that term is used other than as a visual representation of a person or a kind of virtual body used to represent the actual body...but I guess I'm bringing it up because I'm trying to convey the idea of a self-representation). A representation of an individual can exist as an autobiographical text or maybe a self-portrait or a musical composition...but now it can also exist as this big jumble of different types of media. Online profiles, for example, can have text (including lists and links to websites), pictures, videos, songs, blogs, ways of contacting the individual (which takes different forms like phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, screennames), representations of networks of friends (with their pictures and names that they choose to represent themselves), results of online surveys (are you a slut, what cocktail are you, etc), animation, and other things I'm probably forgetting. I guess I'm just interested in how people use interactive media to represent themselves and how our view of an individual changes depending on how we interact with their personal representation.