Adventures in Ethics and Science

In the aftermath of the ScienceBloggers' assault on Manhattan, Mark Chu-Carroll put up a nice post on the ways in which bloggers' real-life manner seemed to match or depart from their online personae.

Maybe philosophy's to blame, but I think there's a deep and interesting question here.

Mark writes:

It's quite an odd experience in its way; between our blogs, and our back-channel forums, we've become a tight-knit community, and the people there were my friends, even though I'd never seen them before.

And yet, as is clear from Mark's blogger-specific observations, there are ways in which a person's "voice" in his or her blog posts, or in posts in our internal forums, can convey a distinctive picture of what someone is like in real life -- a picture that, frequently, turns out to be some distance from the person you find in front of you.

I don't think this can be attributed to people not being themselves on their blogs. Rather, I think it may come down to how we express ourselves -- and what we're trying to communicate -- to different audiences.

Online, we don't know who may be reading. There's a way in which one's blog persona is a very public thing (and, thanks to the Google cache, a very public thing that may be available for close inspection for a long time). This can make you pretty careful about how you present yourself. At the same time, especially for those blogging while pseudonymous, communication online can feel safer -- you can put your ideas and arguments out there and let them sink or swim on their own merits, rather than having them tied up with preexisting impressions about what kind of person the author of those ideas and arguments is.

But it's not like people don't make careful decisions about how they present themselves to others in real life. (Indeed, this can be a big part of staying employed.) And I daresay that even in this digital age, most people are experimenting with self-presentation in real life long before they start dabbling with self-presentation online.

Either way, the crux of the problem seems to be that many of us feel like we have a self to which other people don't have immediate access. When the Rocket Man muses, "I'm not the man they think I am at home," it points to the fact that people form an impression of who we are that may not match well at all with who we think we really are. In order for others to understand what we see as our true self -- for them not just to see us as intelligible, but to understand us as we understand ourselves -- we have to communicate the inner stuff that we have access to but they don't. In communicating that stuff, we have to figure out what bits of the inner stuff really are reflective of who we are and which bits are extraneous.

Sometimes communicating who we are actually turns into a process of discovering who we are, or even of shaping who we are -- working to become the self we want to be but are not yet.

Sometimes the people with whom we're communicating will take the bits of ourselves that we're laying out for them and draw quite different conclusions about who we really are. Could their conclusions be more accurate than our own? I suspect so. There are times when that might be comforting (as when one is in the throes of the impostor syndrome), and other times when this might not (say, if one aspired to be a singer and didn't have the grasp of pitch he thought he did).

Is who we are even a stable target? Is the best judge of who we are ourselves, our friends, our families, or strangers? Are we most ourselves in real life or online? Are we most ourselves when no one is watching or when anyone could be watching? And does who we are even matter from the point of view of expressing the other ideas, arguments, and questions we want to put out into the discourses in the public and private spheres?