Conversations about who we are online.
I Am Not My Internet Personality, and You Probably Aren't Yours, Either.
I Am Not My Internet Personality, and You Probably Aren't Yours, Either.
Where are you the funniest, smartest, most Facetuned version of yourself? This week, the Cut explores the complexities, vanities, and pitfalls of self-presentation online We'll call him Michael, and my friend Demi was obsessed with him. An image search of his name would turn up a nightmarish panoply of "that guy"-ism: Bathroom mirror shots.
nymag.com
This was an interesting post I read a while back - I'm not sure if I completely agree, but would love to hear your thoughts.




I spend a huge amount of time on the internet, and I also have met probably 150 people in person who I knew primarily online. I've attended three weddings of folks who I had only or primarily known on the internet.
Sometimes people are fairly different online versus in meatspace, sometimes not. I think I'm basically my internet personality, but that's kinda hard for me to judge?
Maybe I should just ping friends and see what they think, because I'm a jerk like that. @scopes, @SweaterPrime, @cupcake1713, @andytuba
@greenie is basically the same in the rl except that she has more of a tendency to represent weeedbot as an actual weed smoking robot in person.
omg sweater no one knows what weeedbot is. jeeez, you're embarrassing me in front of normal people who don't have strange comic-making, marijuana smoking internet robots!
I just refuse to believe that anyone currently using this platform doesn't know about weeedbot.
it's literally never been mentioned on this platform until now!
this platform needs 1000% more weeedbot then. /weeedbot maybe?
I'm not talking to you anymore! I shoulda left you in that bear trap!
:(
I need to know about weeedbot!
oh jeez.
okay so weeedbot is a chat bot. He has a library of like 500 different characters, and he'll make comics based on what people say in chat. He'll randomly assign different characters to the different people in the conversation.
People have fun with it, especially because chat communities tend to be text-only and you often don't see (or even know) what each other look like. Attaching a (sometimes famous) character to the words coming out of your mouth kinda creates an interesting effect for people.
He also occasionally talks, and says weird shit.
I'm not sure if this comic will upload properly, but I'll try. This comic is from when a person (snape) was unreasonably upset about URLs and how they were rendered, and went on a rant about it.
well, that uploaded properly, it just takes up a huge amount of space. sorry!
Ha!
I've been interviewing a bunch of different types of people for this project and notice that most people think they're the same - or perhaps more reserved or more outgoing in one space or another. This article surprised me a bit because of that. But I've only done 20 interviews so far so it's not much of a sample size given the population of the internet lol
I mean, there's totally folks who make entirely different personas online, of course, which is an interesting phenomenon itself. And there's folks who use the internet to explore different identities, and others who use facebook to seem like significantly different people than they actually are.
But generally everyone I've met has been more or less the same person they were online. Some were probably a significant amount more outgoing, or more forceful or aggressive online versus in person, but I can't actually think of any extreme outliers that were like "wow this person's personas are entirely different!" with the exception of maybe one or two people, who ended up being like actual legit sociopaths, so I'm kinda discounting those. :p
But I also don't hang out much on facebook or on sites where you're really pushed to cultivate a public image / persona, so I wonder how that also factors into things.
So AndyTuba doesn't work for IMZY but he's a direct friend of IMZY's inner circle...?
Still trying to figure out the power structure...
lol!
I mean, I'm just a community manager here. Andy is a friend of mine, yes. No, he doesn't work for Imzy. Not really a power structure thing though!
Sounds an AWFUL lot like a power structure to ME, Maester Community Manager...
AndyTuba had that gif made of his avatar, too...
lol, andy is around various other websites, he's had that avatar for ages :)
it is very cute though.
Illuminatubi confirmed.
For me, I am very compartmentalized in how I behave with others. There is the me at home, the me at work, and the me online. I am definitely not my internet personality, however the me here is a lot more open, willing to share, and honest than the me at work. The me at home is even more different, and that's reserved for my partner and my companion felines to enjoy. Heh, "enjoy". Ahem.
I actually had a conversation about this just today. Personally, I tend to be more genuine in forums that are closed or private, or where I can control the audience, like Facebook. When I joined Google+, I resolved to post everything there Publicly and it makes me very "aware" and mindful of what I post. Mostly, that involves not posting my location or other private details publicly (you never know) but sometimes I stop and decide whether I want the world to associate me with that post - and sometimes I decide that I don't.
So I suppose you could say my public online persona is cultivated to a certain degree but I think I'm much the same person IRL as I am online.