Internet Personalities

I was one of those that backed Ze Frank's A Show project on Kickstarter. I'm a fan of both of these things so their union was a beautiful melding of not-dissimilar worlds. I chipped in as much as my student budget would allow, and did some sort or wiggle-shimmy hybrid dance in anticipation of having a consistent dose of Ze again. Not long after, I received an email giving me links to my goodies and asking me to send a picture so that it could be posted on his Wall of Thank.

Right.
A picture.
This is going to be a thing.

Whether intentional or not, the nature of the internet allows for crafted personalities. We post pictures we want people to see, tweet things that we want others to think that we think are interesting. When a friend posts an embarrassing photo of us on Facebook, we experience that very special panic that never existed prior to the advent of social networking and photo tagging. Factual example: I once did a bit about 85+ days of heat. I did not have that information hiding out in my brain anyplace. If you look at my original draft, it says that the Season of the Heat was divided into 14 different eras based on the ruling families and technological advancement during that time. Once husband assured me that this was not true and (based on the amount of time that actually passed) could only theoretically be possible for strains of bacteria, I came to accept my need to Google a bit. But I sounded like I knew precisely how many days had passed. I portrayed myself as the sort of person who pays attention to temperature trends. Or who reads weather statistics. Or makes a tick on the wall every time there is another day of blistering heat like some sort of post-apocalyptic survivor searching for anything meaningful to keep her sanity.

This leads to interesting possibilities of turning a personality into art form. Finely controlled content diffusion, each piece being formed and shaped to support the whole. Like a mosaic. Or collage. Except instead of glossy magazine cutouts, it's photos of your vacation, and tagged body bits at a party, and tweets about your day, and bits of speech that would have been brilliant and cutting if only you had thought of it in the moment. 

And let's be honest here-- it's not just the internet. Human beings are always posing for the persona camera. People meeting for the first time often list what they want the other person to most pay attention to. Because we attribute various values to different life achievements. A Harvard graduate "wins" over being community college degree holder. A chef is "better" than a customer support representative. A doctor beats everything because DAMMIT, THEY SAVE LIVES. Rarely do we describe ourselves on a first meeting as having failed fourth grade or as currently suffering from IBS. That said, the internet is uniquely capable of giving us fine control over this natural tendency. We gain control not only of what we choose to say, but craft precisely how we want to say it, in what venue, and how we look while we do it.

(I'd love to datamine FaceBook to see what the things we post actually say about ourselves and our culture. I would make charts. They would be in fantastic colors.)

So I was asked to provide a picture and there was nothing that I already had that felt like it portrayed who I really am. Or rather, who I think I really am that I want the everyone to see and think I really am. I go through this every time I have to upload an account picture. I'm get scared of random non-issues like what-if-I'm-the-only-one-with-a-serious-picture. That's like showing up to a beach party in formal wear-- I have no idea how to play that off. (And then I get self-conscious and awkward and then no one asks me to dance.)

So I thought about doing the classic phone-camera-in-the-bathroom shot-- I could say I was being ironic. Or that I was trying to craft a postmodern homage to 2005 social networking. (But then I don't think it would stand up under critique.) I do have a lot of sillyly pretentious hipstamatic photos, I suppose I could use one of those. But is that still cool? Or is it not cool? Has it become so cool that it's not cool now? Can it be ironically cool to like a thing that was once cool but isn't cool anymore? If I pretend that I don't care that it's cool, is that cool? (I never actually fully understood the science of cool-- any cool that I might have displayed in my life cannot be claimed as purposeful, so I am abandoning it.)

But then I remembered that I just got my fancy new camera thus providing the excuse to play around with it. I took many many photos of myself exhibiting different facial expressions, none of which I am certain any human creature makes in real life.

Have you seen these faces?

I eventually settled on the photo I've currently been using on social networking sites. Maybe it's not the honestest picture ever, but at least it says something about how I currently feel about how I think I should be portrayed. And that's some sort of meta-level of honesty, I suppose.