How many personalities do you have when you’re online? Are you a father, a husband, a beer-drinking buddy, a co-worker? A devout Christian or into BSDM? Often times, this could describe a single person. To be sure, the Internet does not make it easy to keep these different facets of your personality separate. The best we can do today is having multiple dating and social networking profiles, perhaps a few Instant Messaging nicknames that reflect different aspects of your personality.
Keith N. Hampton, an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania:
For online impression management to be effective, the sites should be redesigned to allow people to reveal different aspects of their identity to different users. You should be able to present one face to your boss, and another to your poker buddies. We have very real reasons for wanting to segment our social network.
In the online identity arena, this is called persona management. I’ve been interested in the concept for several years, ever since I Google’d my usual login name and found over 50 results, some more risky than other (I was researching porn sites for a project, seriously).
Current initiatives like OpenID and the social graph are beginning to deliver real-world functionality that allows us to present a specific persona based on the context of the communication. In the meantime, researchers are delving into how single people present themselves on dating and social networking sites.
In one study of online dating, professors at Rutgers, Georgetown and Michigan State found that in the absence of visual and oral cues, single people develop their own presentational tactics: monitoring the length of their e-mail messages (too wordy equals too desperate); limiting the times during which they send messages (a male subject learned that writing to women in the wee hours makes them uncomfortable); and noting the day they last logged on (users who visit the site too infrequently may be deemed unavailable or, worse, undesirable). The scholars found it common for online daters to fudge their age or weight, or to post photographs that were five years old. Also, the world is round and the chemical symbol for water is H2O.
