[Air-L] Food updates

Sam Ladner samladner at gmail.com
Tue Nov 3 14:40:14 PST 2009


Yes, of course we're facing a new identity crisis: how do we manage a
multiple selves at the same time? It's very interesting to note the rise in
the "social media guru" who supposedly will guide you and your company to
present an "appropriate" digital self at all times.

We are also noticing this need among user experience designers. Facebook has
a "groups" function, which will allow you to select and manage the front you
present to people in your friends list (but they provided it too late for
many people who already had hundreds of friends. Who wants to manually
categorize what self to offer to what people?).

Rhiannon is correct: this is the end of the postmodern virtual self. The
ubiquity of digital presentations of self has now reached such a state that
it part of a Western cultural competence to be able to present multiple
selves, simultaneously, materially and virtually, and in "appropriate" ways.

We have lost control of some of these online presentations of ourselves,
which will mean that we must collectively wrestle with social breaches. I
have already noticed people beginning to "ignore" online breaches of
inappropriate selves into other fronts, such as the workplace. This is
particularly true, again, for user experience designers who recognize how
much of the Web lint out there is actually out of our direct control.



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