QotW6: How to Win Friends and Influence People... Online?
Online privacy is such a tricky thing to manage. How much information is too much to give? We've all been told not to give personal information away over the internet, but that's hardly feasible if you want to maintain an online presence with any sort of significance at all. To establish a connection with your audience and catch their attention (Rosen, 2004) requires selective self-disclosure and giving out information that previously was reserved for intimates or friends, in order to create an emotionally memorable image of yourself for your hoped-for audience. If you want to present a strong online identity, you need to create a cohesive and consistent picture of yourself. According to some, this is best achieved by sharing personal details about your life in the hope of appealing to your audience emotionally.
The internet community at large doesn't seem to have any qualms about sharing personal information. Any casual user of the Internet will surely have come across gigabytes worth of personal information from complete strangers scattered across the Web - from blogs. On weblogs, people habitually disclose both the mundane and the profound. For example, what the author ate for breakfast may be listed alongside a recount of a failed relationship for all and sundry to read. The question then becomes whether we should or should not share this information publicly.
Studies have shown that talking about personal emotional experiences can have a positive effect when it lessens isolation by helping people connect to society, but if the disclosure is met with indifference or disapproval, there is a negative effect greater than any adverse effects from non-disclosure (Rosen, 2004). Picture the weblog owner writing about something deeply felt, and receiving positive feedback, sympathy, and encouragement from the virtual community. The writer in question will have his feelings validated and receive emotional support. Conversely, picture the same weblog owner in the same situation, met with silence instead. Silence, as a lack of positive feedback, can be construed as negative feedback - taken to mean that your content is not worthy of notice. Is this a risk we have to take when seeking social connections and empathy from a virtual community?
I'd like to think not. A weblog can be a lonely thing, but when you take advantage of the existing online social structures to hook yourself up to a greater community, online social interaction becomes a whole new beast. Take, for example, livejournal. Livejournal has been designed for optimal interaction. Its comment functions are such that when users comment and reply to each others' comments, comment threads are created, turning each post into a mini forum board. You can only choose to receive email notifications to replies, so that you don't have to check on old posts. Blogs posts from users on your friends list are also compiled onto your "friends page", which you can access from your journal page, making it easier to keep up with your friends, much like an RSS feed.
What sets livejournal apart from other weblog platforms such a blogger, however, is its community function. On livejournal, users are free to set up communities based on interests, beliefs, or anything at all. A community is simply a shared journal that many members can post to, with moderator and maintainer access levels being given to certain users. Some communities, such as support communities, lend themself to a high level of emotional disclosure. This level of disclosure is usually met by the majority of members, who then provide sympathy, support, encouragement, and advise in the form of comments. In such a community, the more you share, the more you receive. How does one show any genuine compassion or effectively help an online stranger who doesn't share any information about himself? In contrast, the user who talks freely about his personal emotional state is likely to get more detailed or relevant responses.
One often encounters like-minded individuals in a community setting. Moving past the "community" stage to form interpersonal relationships often requires greater disclosure, both factual and emotional. Most people don't have any problems with this, either. After all, you wouldn't form a closer relationship with someone that you mistrusted. It's hard to figure out who to trust on the internet, but a simple lack of physicality does not result in a vacuum of identity cues - they just become more subtle (Donath, 1996).
Take, for example, the online strategy game Utopia (yes, Utopia again). At the moment I've worked very closely with the same group of roughly six or seven people for almost two months, with approximately twelve more who are relatively newer or online less often. Because of the time-sensitive and co-operative nature of the game, we have to organise to be online at the same time to do certain things. Also, due to the nature of my own hobbies I'm online almost all the time, and I leave an IRC client running in the background. These people come from all over the world: the group includes Swedes, Canadians, a Norwegian, Americans, Malaysians, Singaporeans, and even an Israeli - this means there's always at least at least seven people online at any given time.
The result is that I've spent a lot of time talking with those six/seven people mentioned earlier and a great deal of disclosure has definitely been going on. Topics discussed range from the impersonal to the personal, the trivial to the profound. Players share opinions on politics, cultural and social issues, or tell each other about personal problems or triumphs, or just chat and joke. I have phone numbers (landlines and mobiles) of nine of these people stored in my contacts database. I'd like to believe that I have succeeded in "achiev[ing] emotional intimacy with strangers" (Rosen, 2004). The only problem with that is that as we progressed along the relational dynamic, they ceased to be strangers and became friends.
References
Rosen, Jeffrey (2004, July). The Naked Crowd. Retrieved March 10, 2007 from
http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA5FF.htm
Donath, Judith (1996, November). Identity and Deception in the Virutal Community. Retrieved February 23, 2007, from http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html
The internet community at large doesn't seem to have any qualms about sharing personal information. Any casual user of the Internet will surely have come across gigabytes worth of personal information from complete strangers scattered across the Web - from blogs. On weblogs, people habitually disclose both the mundane and the profound. For example, what the author ate for breakfast may be listed alongside a recount of a failed relationship for all and sundry to read. The question then becomes whether we should or should not share this information publicly.
Studies have shown that talking about personal emotional experiences can have a positive effect when it lessens isolation by helping people connect to society, but if the disclosure is met with indifference or disapproval, there is a negative effect greater than any adverse effects from non-disclosure (Rosen, 2004). Picture the weblog owner writing about something deeply felt, and receiving positive feedback, sympathy, and encouragement from the virtual community. The writer in question will have his feelings validated and receive emotional support. Conversely, picture the same weblog owner in the same situation, met with silence instead. Silence, as a lack of positive feedback, can be construed as negative feedback - taken to mean that your content is not worthy of notice. Is this a risk we have to take when seeking social connections and empathy from a virtual community?
I'd like to think not. A weblog can be a lonely thing, but when you take advantage of the existing online social structures to hook yourself up to a greater community, online social interaction becomes a whole new beast. Take, for example, livejournal. Livejournal has been designed for optimal interaction. Its comment functions are such that when users comment and reply to each others' comments, comment threads are created, turning each post into a mini forum board. You can only choose to receive email notifications to replies, so that you don't have to check on old posts. Blogs posts from users on your friends list are also compiled onto your "friends page", which you can access from your journal page, making it easier to keep up with your friends, much like an RSS feed.
What sets livejournal apart from other weblog platforms such a blogger, however, is its community function. On livejournal, users are free to set up communities based on interests, beliefs, or anything at all. A community is simply a shared journal that many members can post to, with moderator and maintainer access levels being given to certain users. Some communities, such as support communities, lend themself to a high level of emotional disclosure. This level of disclosure is usually met by the majority of members, who then provide sympathy, support, encouragement, and advise in the form of comments. In such a community, the more you share, the more you receive. How does one show any genuine compassion or effectively help an online stranger who doesn't share any information about himself? In contrast, the user who talks freely about his personal emotional state is likely to get more detailed or relevant responses.
One often encounters like-minded individuals in a community setting. Moving past the "community" stage to form interpersonal relationships often requires greater disclosure, both factual and emotional. Most people don't have any problems with this, either. After all, you wouldn't form a closer relationship with someone that you mistrusted. It's hard to figure out who to trust on the internet, but a simple lack of physicality does not result in a vacuum of identity cues - they just become more subtle (Donath, 1996).
Take, for example, the online strategy game Utopia (yes, Utopia again). At the moment I've worked very closely with the same group of roughly six or seven people for almost two months, with approximately twelve more who are relatively newer or online less often. Because of the time-sensitive and co-operative nature of the game, we have to organise to be online at the same time to do certain things. Also, due to the nature of my own hobbies I'm online almost all the time, and I leave an IRC client running in the background. These people come from all over the world: the group includes Swedes, Canadians, a Norwegian, Americans, Malaysians, Singaporeans, and even an Israeli - this means there's always at least at least seven people online at any given time.
The result is that I've spent a lot of time talking with those six/seven people mentioned earlier and a great deal of disclosure has definitely been going on. Topics discussed range from the impersonal to the personal, the trivial to the profound. Players share opinions on politics, cultural and social issues, or tell each other about personal problems or triumphs, or just chat and joke. I have phone numbers (landlines and mobiles) of nine of these people stored in my contacts database. I'd like to believe that I have succeeded in "achiev[ing] emotional intimacy with strangers" (Rosen, 2004). The only problem with that is that as we progressed along the relational dynamic, they ceased to be strangers and became friends.
References
Rosen, Jeffrey (2004, July). The Naked Crowd. Retrieved March 10, 2007 from
http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA5FF.htm
Donath, Judith (1996, November). Identity and Deception in the Virutal Community. Retrieved February 23, 2007, from http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html
posted by xian @ 4:14 PM
2 Comments:
At 8:26 PM,
Kevin said…
Well written piece on Livejournal, which makes everyone share their postings in a common community, rather than regular blogs where there is no integrated system of sharing.
Full grades and a special mention award.
At 8:47 PM,
CrazyDerby said…
Very well written. I can't believe that the person who wrote this is the same person who I talk to online....
That's a compliment btw ;)
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