Download
1 / 53
530 likes | 801 Vues
SELF PRESENTATION ON THE INTERNET Susan B. Barnes Rochester Institute of Technology sbbgpt@rit.edu. Abstract
E N D
SELF PRESENTATION ON THE INTERNET Susan B. Barnes Rochester Institute of Technology sbbgpt@rit.edu
Abstract Despite emerging visual technologies, such as the World Wide Web, many Internet environments remain pre-dominately text-based, such as e-mail. When people present themselves to others they use written communication.
Abstract (cont.) Although text provides a limited number of visual and sensory cues, social presence can be established. Perceived sociable interaction with others, requires individuals to project a sense of self. This occurs when people use email addresses, signature lines, nicknames, and personal profiles.
Online communication disconnects a person from his or her words. Separation of the physical body from the communication process enables people to create idealized descriptions, present alternate personas, and misbehave online. Thus, the Internet introduces a variety of new options for self presentation.
Theory of Self George Herbert Mead (1932, 1934) argued that the self arises through social interactions with objects and other people.
Theory of Self Consciousness awareness of the self and others leads to identity formation. Mead’s theories led to the idea of symbolic interactionism.
Symbolic interactionists contend that the formation of social worlds involves inter-communicative symbolic interaction.
Building on the ideas of symbolic interactionists, media scholars, such as Paul Levinson, Joshua Meyrowitz, Neil Postman, and Lance Strate, have studied media environments.
Media as environments is an ecological view that considers how communication media influence human perception, understanding, feeling, and value.
See S. B. Barnes (2003). Media Ecology and Symbolic Interactionism. Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Media Ecology Conference, New York, June 2002 (located at www.media-ecology.org)
The Internet creates a new type of social environment in which people can meet and interact.
Example of a conversation > From: GMP > >Actually, we’d all do better > reading books. Especially your book! ;-) --Joe
Research on establishing a social presence through textual exchanges, now falls under the larger category of social presence theory.
Social presence is based on how participants perceive their exchanges to be: unsociable sociable insensitive sensitive cold warm impersonal personal
In 1976, Short, Williams, and Christie explored the social psychology of telecommunication and argued that media have various degrees of social presence, which influence the ways in which individuals will interact.
In reduced-cue situations (e-mail, chat, discussion lists) the communicators will modify their behavior and head-nods indicating agreement can be replaced with verbal statements such as “I agree.”
From media ecological and social presence perspectives, Online participants creatively utilize language to create social presence.
EMOTICONS U.S. & European Japanese Emotions :-) Regular smile (^_^) Regular smile :-ll Anger (^o^;>) Excuse me :-)) Very happy (^o^) Happy
IRC Commands and How They Appear /invite command as seen by the inviter as: ***Inviting Red_Fox to channel +FuzzyAnimals as seen by the inited person as: ***/RobBoy invites you to channel +FuzzyAnimals
Building Social Presence A sense of social presence can be established by referring to participants by name and by sharing activities both on and offline.
Building Social Presence HBC: Sally that was a very good answer to the ? Asked by the prof. Jim: Is anyone going to happy hour at Bob’s pub?
Adding Playfulness and Humor Having fun with the text adds to the sociability of the communication exchange.
Adding Playfulness and Humor Jim: Quiet! Jane is doing a bang-up job here. Sally: Shhhh . . . Its getting way too noisy in this room.
Adding Non-verbal Cues Non-verbal textual cues, such as punctuation marks, and capital letters, can be used to express nonverbal communication. For example, TYPING IN CAPITAL LETTERS indicates shouting.
Adding Non-verbal Cues HBC: Hey was that a tough one! Tom: I’LL TELL YOU AGAIN IF YOU *STILL* HAVEN’T GOTTEN IT.
Biocca, Harms and Burgoon (2002) state that the work of classic social psychologist George Herbert Mead is evident in early research on mediated social presence.
Biocca, Harms and Burgoon (2002) say: “Symbolic interactionism assumed that symbolic representations were central to all social phenomena, that models of the other contributed to our conceptualizations of the social and helped form the self” (p. 8).
Presently, much of the current work being conducted on social presence explores visually-oriented mediated environments.
Often the goal of this research is to make technological environments more “realistic” or “increasingly social.”
In contrast, media ecologists are interested in how the characteristics of a medium influence the ways people symbolically communicate and behave.
From a media ecological perspective people present themselves in the following ways: e-mail addresses nicknames (screen names) personal profiles + others
Social e-mail addresses allow people to play with identity. Examples include: PI_2002@hotmail.com SportsNews@earthlink.net KoolKid597@yahoo.com RecordMan1950@prodigy.com
E-mail Addresses provide information about the person and the organization hosting the account. For example: john_doe@wired.com smith@harvard.edu
Screen names, nicknames (“nicks”), or pseudonyms are popular identity markers.
Some screen names are neutral labels, while others are based on real names (SueBEE), locations (MrNewYork), or hobbies (GuitarMan).
Personal profilesare often short descriptions that state age and sex or they can be more detailed profiles that describe physical features and interests.
Personal profile Hi! I’m Angie. I’m an 18 year-old female who is five feet five with short curly brown hair. My hobbies are going to the movies and shopping.
MUD Character Description Her eyes are green, TOTALLY green, with large black irises, her teeth and tongue startling flashes of color when she opens her mouth or smiles. She looks basically human, except for the multicolor of her skin, and her long, thin fingers (and are there more than 5 fingers there? Maybe. . . It’s hard to tell)
Signature Lines Harold Q.Smith (Professor Emeritus) Speech Communication Trade and Applied Books Editor, New York Press Editor, VCI: Virtual Culture Inquiries ISSN 1069-0426. Send submissions to HQS at BFUVM.BFU.EDU Buffalo Falls University, Falls City, NY 16802 Manuscripts are being accepted for the 2003 volumes.
Signature Lines Harold Q.Smith, Ret. ||||| Oh, don’t the day seem lank and long Dealer in magic & spells. \;/ When all goes right, —J. W. Wells ‘0.0’ And nothing goes wrong? Everybody should get ( v ) / exactly what they deserve. \*/ / And wouldn’t life seem exceedingly / \ / flat. REAL HARD!!! / |=| With nothing whatever to grumble at? | | —HQS _| |_ Princess Ida, Act II
Although online communicators can present a sense of self to others, the lack of physical co-presence introduces new for the online communication process.
These include anonymity, the creation of idealized self descriptions, the presentation of alternate personas, and online misbehavior.
Waskul and Douglass’s (1997) research on cyberselves revealed that 22% of the screen names they analyzed did not have a profile. As a result, these individuals only exited as a screen name.
Anonymity Text-only interaction allows Internet participants to choose their level of anonymity.
Anonymity In addition to self expression and experimentation, anonymity can also enable teenagers to explore their real world identities (see Turkle, 1996).
For example, New York Times reporter Jennifer Egan (2000) described the ways in which a 15-year old teen named Jeffrey discovered his gay identity through Internet correspondence.
Misrepresentation Many of the personas that people present online are not real.
Misrepresentation On the Internet, a 300 pound 49-year-old man described himself as a 17-year-old 5-9 blue-eyed stud. The deception was revealed in a face-to-face encounter.
Misrepresentation In text-only Internet correspondence, physical features are separated from online identity, people can represent themselves as anyone they want to be.
