4 ms·
I place this mostly at the feet of social media. Since your past now never fades, you have a few choices: 1) Don't put/do anything dubious online. (Theoreti
by mfringel 15y ago
I place this mostly at the feet of social media. Since your past now never fades, you have a few choices:
1) Don't put/do anything dubious online. (Theoretically easy, harder in practice.)
2) Don't put/do anything that could be de-contextualized and subsequently re-contextualized as dubious, online. (Hard, but not mathematically impossible.)
3) Create some kind of autonomy so that you're not subject to the effects of social-media-based judgment, because social networking never forgets who you were. (Moderate difficulty).
Individuals choose one of more of the above approaches for the various parts of their life... possibly all three simultaneously.
Since social media makes no distinctions about who you were then vs. who you are now, every moment of behavior counts equally into future perception... so being polite, and deferential, and constantly "selling", is not a independent life choice, but rather the result of a most subtle form of coercion.
Coercion is not only from the barrel of a gun. You may completely swear off of social media altogether, or only post precision-calibrated Markov-chained text blurbs that make you look like a model citizen, but you get much less control about what your friends post.
- yuhong 15y agoI think the illusion that people are perfect is fundamentally flawed and have for a while now.
- _delirium 15y agoI don't think it's only the fear of putting things out there that might reflect negatively, but also the temptation of putting things out there that might reflect positively. I actively try not to do it, but I do find myself participating in even online discussion groups with one eye towards potential "personal brand" building. Am I just posting at HN for the discussion, or to build a platform? Or: I used to submit essays to Usenet or Kuro5hin, mostly out of a desire to stimulate discussion and get feedback. But now I post them on my blog, and when I'm writing them there's, consciously or not, always this background thought of where I'll advertise that post so people read it, whether it'll get me new RSS subscribers, etc. I even sometimes think, on the occasions where I've written a long-ish Wikipedia article from scratch, that if I were really doing it right, maybe I should've posted it on my personal blog instead of submitting it as a Wikipedia article--- because I can't fully capture the personal-brand-building at Wikipedia. I'm sure there are people who do give in to that temptation, too.