Anyone that was un-fortunate enough to attend too many blind dates, job interviews or other type of meetings where you need to formulate an opinion on someone in a short time, and at the same time represent yourself adequately, is familiar with how frustrating these encounters can sometimes be. You need to decide something of importance, based on a shallow acquaintance. Knowing that not all people excel in presenting their “real” selves, you are aware you might make a wrong judgment or miss out. Yes - often the call is easy, but sometimes it is not.

But when you come to think about it, in these physical life encounters, you actually do have quite a lot to chew on: what is said, what is seen, attitude, body language, face expression, tone of voice, selection of words and so on. It is true, that not all people are equally gifted in social self-presentation or social interpretation of others, and that the human mind has a bad tendency to categorize according to past encounters even when it is more harmful than helpful to do so. But still, meeting someone in person even for a short period of time, gives you so much more than what is revealed in most people’s public online profile.

When book novelists are interviewed, you often hear them say that one of the challenges in expressing themselves in their books is to be able to reveal their life stories and observations sincerely and accurately while keeping those personal things they do not want to showcase to the public eye, hidden effectively behind fictional heroines.

Be it a slick short warm gesture in your favorite social network or a long retrospective essay in your personal blog, it seems that the challenge in revealing and hiding yourself in the online world is not so much different in nature than that of the novelist in his book.

For the sake of the discussion, I am assuming that people have a need to self express in front of a selected audience larger than their most intimate friends and family and are aware of the plethora of online venues that exist today to do so (of course some people don’t fit into these assumptions).

So taking the above as granted, these are the main online participation patterns I noticed:
• Closed participation – people that value their privacy dearly and therefore, for the most part, exclude themselves from the game to the bare unavoidable minimum.
• Careful participation – these people express themselves but are pretty careful, and conscious about the present and future implications their writings may have
• Carefree participation – these people don’t see any reason to be too careful about what they write, probably thinking – what you see is what you get

As for myself, over the years, I have been slowly but steadily moving from a closed participation pattern to a careful one. Noticing the dynamics of society and of my own influenced conduct, I wouldn’t be surprised if not too far down the road I’ll find myself in the carefree rubric, telling you all for example the juicy details of the most terribly embarrassing incident that happened to me last Tuesday…

Would be interesting to hear your thoughts and stories on the topic, but please be aware (or beware) that if you choose to reply, as you type, you will be effectively further carving out your very own online persona (-: