I was going to completely ignore this whole profile-building exercise. But a conversation I had with Soju the other day has gotten me thinking.
I've spent so much of my life online in some cyber-community or another. It seems like large chunks of the 90s were spent sitting at a keyboard chatting up pimply teenagers or soccer moms who were pretending to be warlocks, drag-queens or hipsters. Everyone was wearing some sort of home-grown avatar, smug in the blithe assumption that no-one could guess at their canine pedigree.
Now that I find myself setting out to build an identity here on myspace I'm faced with over a decade of accumulated cynicism, and it all seems to be coalescing around one basic idea: I think Sherry Turkle's whole 'life-on-screen' construct is a load of bollocks.
Her basic arguement is that we all, to a greater or less degree, reinvent ourselves online. And through repeated useage that vitual persona can become become a real, fully formed personality.
By extension, the personality profiles here on myspace should eventually become passable facsimilies of the people they descibe. Getting to know someone's profile, and interacting with them online should be a reasonable parallel to getting to know them in the real world.
But I disagree. I've found the churn rate much higher than in the real world. Distracted by carefully written profiles, I've wasted hours getting to know people I have virtually nothing in common with. In the real world they'd have held my interest for less than a minute... online I've wasted days trying to decide whether they're interesting.
So, I think i've decided that anything I'm likely to write here will have less to do with who i am than who I want you to think I am. Similarly, anything you've written in your profile is probably designed to charm, impress, or captivate, regardless of whether you're actually charming, impressive, or captivating.
But what value does an ingratiating description actually have? What's the relationship between the people interested in your profile and the people who would be interested in plain-old you?
It seems like the only truly useful profile information is the stuff that can be read between the lines. The subjects avoided, the style of humor, spelling, grammar, bands listed and how they're grouped, scattered, or fail to play well with each other. Basically the mind-buggering meta-analysis of all the information that I can be reasonably sure you were unconcious of when you were writing your profile.
Not convinced? Ok, consider this... by web-profile standards, this "about me" section contains almost no information about me, but I'm guessing you probably have a pretty decent idea of what I'm like. Ok, maybe not what I'm like exactly, but certainly whether or not you think you'd get along with me.
... and that is more valuable than anything charming, impressive or otherwise carefully constructed that I could have written.
(Now why do I get a feeling that i'll be a while before I make any friends here?)
