In the on-line world something amazing happened. Anonymity.

In actuality, true anonymity on the Internet is a rare commodity. Just because you created a MySpace page with the username PuppyHunter342 and posted a photo of your neighbor’s cat on your profile, doesn’t mean someone can’t figure out who you are with enough resources. But just like the plastic lock on a file cabinet, it’s enough to keep the passing acquaintance from finding out.

In practice though many researchers have found that the key problem this has created (in part) is that people feel more liberated to show their at home self in public, or in many cases project their internal voice out into their communications much like a free writing exercise. You don’t know me, I don’t know you and in fact I may not even exist beyond the words you’re reading on this page, so the sense of social repercussions never even comes into play if you decide to write a rant in the comments. At worst, in some peoples minds, they’re simply writing a comment to someone. Not generating yet one more piece of electronic documentation for forming their online identity.

Beyond that, I personally think this may happen because most people interact on the Internet from home on in the privacy of their office space where they are conversing or thinking with their family/internal tone and then using that same voice as they type. This probably wasn’t the best thing to happen.

People like to categorize things as I mentioned at the start of this series. You’re going to be categorized, like it not, so why handicap yourself out of the gate. This is a hard lesson that most people only understand much too late when it comes to living an on-line life (oh nooes, that Facebook photo of you puking from a drunken stupor at that party may come back to haunt you some day).

When you think about it, while this perceived anonymity is a double edged sword it also presents humanity with an amazing gift. The ability to transcend preconceived stereotypes… Well… as long as you’re thoughtful of what you write and where you write it. But even then other people will still try to stereotype you (from casual observation, to academic review).

The perfect example of this self definition would be the growing realm of Virtual Worlds. You can be tall, short, male, female, black, white, green or purple. You can be an extremely unpopular person in the real world, but in a virtual world you can be that Sharp Dressed Man who is eloquent and has all the right connections. Nobody ever has to know unless you tell them.

Most people don’t think about all of this when the venture out to the wide world of the Internet but it’s even more important now than ever to be aware of this issue because of my next point…

…Persistence…

[read the other parts of this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

So… who did you pick? Why did you pick that person?

What assumptions did you make about these people based simply on appearances? Even if you elected to talk to neither and walked to the next bus stop, you have just stereotyped two people and modified your behavior based on those stereotypes.

If you spent any time thinking about this you may have come to realize that there is no good answer here.

My point here is that a persona may or may not have anything to do with who a person really is. In fact, who a person really is is a wholly subjective exercise even when conducted by internal reflection (eg, “finding yourself”).

When you interact with anyone, you are marketing your persona, or in other words your personal brand. You may want people to like you so you put on makeup. You may want to be ignored by people so you wear dingy clothes when you go shopping. All of this applies to the online world as well.

Almost every teenager at some point explores this in high school by adopting the fashion common among their peer group. You know… goth kids, preps, etc…

In the off-line world (or as cyberpunk fans call it, Meatspace), people are often limited to what personas they can adopt purely by their physical appearance. But, given enough guile, money, education and peer group affiliations (not necessarily in that order) people can sometimes transcend stereotypes.

So what does this mean in the on-line world? Oh my… You’ll have to come back to find out.

[read the other parts of this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

There are three distinct issues that should be addressed by anyone looking to engage in social media that are generally under appreciated or overlooked by people when they present themselves on the Internet.

The key words related to these elements are Privacy, Personas and Persistence.

Let’s start with probably the easiest of those to tackle, Personas.

What is a persona? A persona is the image of yourself that you project to the world and therefore is the image of you formed by your audience, be they your next door neighbor or a million TV viewers. It is who people think you are and there are many factors that prejudice your persona even in a real-world face to face engagement.

For the greater part of the 20th Century people in many cultures only had to worry about managing at most two to four personas in their day to day lives; their “at home and unguarded image”, their “work image”, in some cases their “out on the town/with friends” image and let’s not forget their internal voice. For people in the Entertainment industry or in visible leadership roles, some of these frequently blur.

Let’s take for example the actor Mel Gibson. For the greater part of the 1980’s and 1990’s he presented a public persona of a strong alpha male role through his performances. His personal beliefs and opinions mattered little or were unknowable to the general population. Some people aspired to be like him… or really more like the roles he played in movies (his work image). Then there came a point in his life where his perceived personal beliefs on religion and ethnicity became public (these were parts of his private at home persona). This eventually led to his public/work persona evolving into an image of someone who appeared to be a representative for religious extremism. For some people this enhanced his image, for others it was detrimental.

The human brain by design performs pattern recognition. In order to optimize day to day living, your brain collates patterns into trends which in some cases are the basis for stereotypes (from Greek: stereo + týpos = “solid impression”). While stereotypes have a bad reputation due to their common use as a derogatory, like it or not your brain actively develops and validates these profiles. They are a critical aspect of being human and impact how you live and who you interact with.

I will provide two examples to illustrate. Let’s take two males situated at a bus stop in a major U.S. city as our backdrop for this thought exercise. You walk up to the bus stop and see:

• Individual #1 – this person is wearing work dungarees that covered with motor oil and dirt. The person is clean shaven but his hair is disheveled. He is holding a dirty box and smells slightly of sweat.
• Individual #2 – this person is wearing a clean business suit. He is clean shaven and hair groomed. He smells of cologne and is carrying a briefcase.

Who would you engage into conversation with? Why?

[read the other parts of this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

I knew this would eventually happen and it would appear that the day is drawing near where someone is going to delete the Game Zero entry for on Wikipedia. I know there are problems with the entry and how it got created. I don’t consider it a promotion piece though, I consider it a supporting piece to other content within the Wiki where the magazine was relevant.

The key problem as I note on the talk page:

“The key problem here is that most of the web from 1994/1995 is no longer available. Some of the promotion we did within the newsgroups is still locatable, but none of the IRC based promotion we did is archived. Also, most if any of the early links to the magazine are no longer on the web anymore. Archive.org only has 1996 and on for the most part. I can personally vouch for all of these statements as can the entire staff of the magazine as we were pretty proud to be setting these milestones. Some notable examples of sites referencing Game Zero were the NCSA What’s New page which is now gone, as is Iway Magazine (which was an early Internet spotlight magazine) which ranked Game Zero as one of the top 25 gaming sites/top 500 on the web in 1996.”

The magazine was a staple read for most game studios, we were the only one of two non-traditional news publication invited to the Meridian 59 launch party thrown by Trip Hawkins after Studio 3DO bought them out (yes, I got to shake hands with Trip and talk with him for a few minutes). The other was a Canadian TV based videogaming program.

It is with great distress that I can’t locate supporting information about this magazine and I fear that Wikipedia’s shitty content protocols will consign the historical significance of this magazine to the delete bin.

I just added a new group of links to my sidebar called “Eye candy”. These are blogs that I have run across that do nothing more than collect series of artistic images and photography that are great to look through. Generally you can count on loosing an hour on any of them just going back through their archive of posts.