Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other by Sherry Turkle

Author:Sherry Turkle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Information technology - Social aspects, Sociology, Social Science, Social Aspects, Computers, General, Interpersonal Relations, Psychology, Social Psychology, Information Technology, Human-computer interaction
ISBN: 9780465010219
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-01-11T10:00:00+00:00

PRESENTATION ANXIETY

What are the truth claims in a Facebook profile? How much can you lie? And what is at stake if you do? Nancy, an eighteen-year-old senior at Roosevelt, answers this question. “On the one hand, low stakes, because no one is really checking.” Then, with a grimace, she says, “No, high stakes. Everyone is checking.” A few minutes later, Nancy comes back to the question: “Only my best friends will know if I lie a little bit, and they will totally understand.” Then she laughs. “All of this, it is, I guess, a bit of stress.”11

At Cranston, a group of seniors describe that stress. One says, “Thirteen to eighteen are the years of profile writing.” The years of identity construction are recast in terms of profile production. These private school students had to write one profile for their applications to middle school, another to get into high school, and then another for Facebook. Now they are beginning to construct personae for college applications. And here, says Tom, “You have to have a slightly different persona for the different colleges to which you are applying: one for Dartmouth, a different one, say, for Wesleyan.” For this aficionado of profile writing, every application needs a different approach. “By the time you get to the questions for the college application, you are a professional profile writer,” he says. His classmate Stan describes his online profiles in great detail. Each serves a different purpose, but they must overlap, or questions of authenticity will arise. Creating the illusion of authenticity demands virtuosity. Presenting a self in these circumstances, with multiple media and multiple goals, is not easy work. The trick, says Stan, is in “weaving profiles together . . . so that people can see you are not too crazy. . . . What I learned in high school was profiles, profiles, profiles, how to make a me.”

Early in my study, a college senior warned me not to be fooled by “anyone you interview who tells you that his Facebook page is ‘the real me.’ It’s like being in a play. You make a character.” Eric, a college-bound senior at Hadley, a boys’ preparatory school in rural New Jersey, describes himself as savvy about how you can “mold a Facebook page.” Yet, even he is shocked when he finds evidence of girls using “shrinking” software to appear thinner on their profile photographs. “You can’t see that they do it when you look at the little version of the picture, but when you look at a big picture, you can see how the background is distorted.” By eighteen, he has become an identity detective. The Facebook profile is a particular source of stress because it is so important to high school social life. Some students feel so in its thrall that they drop out of Facebook, if only for a while, to collect themselves.

Brad, eighteen, a senior at Hadley, is about to take a gap year to do community service before attending a small liberal arts college in the Midwest.

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