Background
My work intersects with the internet; it has for years, and I prefer it that way. It continually confronts me with some of the bigger ethical questions, to which I might not have answers, but it does make me think about how our behavior changes because of what we interact with online, and how the internet in turn changes in response.
The Online Space
The internet is this duality to me, a space where we can find a treasure trove of information about different things. Through content marketing, FAQs, communities, and now tools such as ChatGPT, we’re able to expand our horizons.
On the flip side of this, we have also started to share a lot about ourselves, and through data collection, we’ve become valuable information for companies to learn from and target us through. People might be aware of how what they share publicly might be something they want to curate; however, fewer people seem too worried about how companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google are learning more from our behavior than what we actually say about ourselves.
The Average Consumer
As data allows marketers to better target their specific customer segments, it creates these homogeneous, generalized groups. While in the past, these groups might have been gendered and generational, nowadays they seem to be more related to interests. An example is the Twitch community, young gamers, which a company might target by appealing to the average player of an average game, with an average knowledge of technology.
By using similar lingo, chat emotes, LEDs, and game consoles (or PC), characters show the target audience “this person is like you, or is a person you want to be.” And this might feel hollow, but it’s effective because people coming into this space, also themselves, to some degree, integrate into the person they think they have to be in that space.
They don’t necessarily remove their individuality, but by entering a space, we are influenced by their behavior, their way of speaking, what is commonly acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
A company integrating into this space to identify with this audience is not that different from a person, but they’re often treated differently, one of them seeming to have an inauthentic reason to be there: financial incentive. But this complaint feels hollow to me now, as social media and people’s desire to make an income online have led so many people online to live pretend lives to profit off the generosity of the people who see them as their peers.
The Avatar
Our avatar is our one “perfect” face, which is supposed to represent the multifaceted person we are. It’s supposed to communicate the exactly curated image as we want the world to see us. It simplifies people, in an easy way to sell our “persona” to the masses.
What might, to some, be a way to express our individuality, has in its own way also become a way to “virtue signal” to a specific audience “I am like you”, so you can trust me.
The Bio
Possibly the best way to explain what I mean are Twitter bios. They’re supposed to say something “about us”, but the reality is we use them to quickly make a determination about a person: where are they from, where are they on the political spectrum, what’s their gender, and their points of view about gender.
We look for hints of recognition and wanting to consider the voices of people who deem us “on their side”, or “with authority”, that what we do is minimize their full complexity to the limited signifier they put in their bios.
The Evolution
However, I am not necessarily against any of this. The internet evolves, and we evolve alongside it. I remember someone at Google Search explaining the cat and mouse game they play with the people who try to game the search algorithm; they constantly push each other to evolve. I think us people are no different.
It’s easy to look at the pitfalls and ignore the good. To give another example, the internet has given us “fake news” produced and consumed en masse, and the worry is that the internet will not become the world’s library of knowledge, but one giant gossip magazine. But similar to an immune system, we can’t address a problem until it presents itself.
We become less interested in clickbait, as we get disappointed by another article that does not say what the title promised to teach us. We stop clicking on links in MSN when the language clearly doesn’t match that of our friend, knowing they must have been hacked, not because we’re cybersecurity specialists, because we’re not, but because it took us learning from ourselves, or others, how to recognize these things and change our behavior.
The Persona
As a marketer, working with data and social media, personas assist in my work, as much as it’s good for society as a whole to be mindful that we are individuals. It wouldn’t be helpful to assume we aren’t influenced by similar cultural phenomena at the same time.
As much as we like considering ourselves unique snowflakes, we’re more similar than we are different, and no interest is distinctly unique either.
Merely a few years ago, we might have kept certain aspects of ourselves hidden from our friends, family, neighbors, and community, for fear of stigma or the assumption they wouldn’t understand this particular part of us. Nowadays, you can find websites, Facebook groups, and Reddit message boards on any and all niche interests and identities, allowing us to build on these aspects of ourselves and further develop them.
Someone once told me that we have different friendships to nurture different aspects of ourselves. I see similar behavior online, including in myself. As the internet allows us to further segment ourselves, we’re also able to build upon these aspects and possibly create a broader, and deeper understanding of the complexities of ourselves, our culture, politics, and with that find new and unique ideas to tackle what the future has to offer.
Reflections
The world and the internet are so vast; there are so many people, and it’s easy to feel small in this expansive universe. However, we might also, in turn, become a little less alone, knowing a like-minded person could be just a few clicks away from us, or a company serving our needs is ready, willing, and able to find us.
We might have to become less naive, becoming better able to recognize the wolves among the sheep. But, knowing how well we seem to be able to evolve, I am confident that we are able to overcome.
