What are you doing, and who are you? Photo by Sasha Wolff on Flickr.
My large introductory media studies class often takes unexpected turns. With 120 students of widely varying backgrounds and interests, I am frequently surprised (and pleased) by new insights, interdisciplinary connections, and individuals’ anecdotes that challenge and enrich our class content.
During our Thursday class last week, we were discussing Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, and I described the basics of Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of social media recently printed in the New Yorker as a way of illustrating possible alternatives to Shirky’s perspective. I was curious to see if my students – who are Facebook fans (so to speak) but Twitter skeptics – tended to identify with Shirky or Gladwell.
Our discussion strayed to interpersonal relationships, rather than focusing on social movements. One of my students described a personal experience that demonstrated his own view of the types of interpersonal ties created by social media. He stated that he had an acquaintance with whom he interacted primarily on Facebook, and thought that he had a great deal of common ground with this person and would enjoy the friend’s company in person. But when they met, he found the Facebook friend to be completely incompatible as an offline friend. Their personalities clashed. He’d had no idea that their interaction would be so uncomfortable.
His experience led the class to explore a question I’d never really considered before. One of the benefits of participating in interpersonal relationships – offline, where difficult personality quirks can’t be avoided – is that we ourselves grow personally from learning to cope with other people. Though that might sound a bit self-centered, it is certainly one of the side effects of participating in relationships, for most of us: we become better able to, well, participate in relationships.
But in social networking, we all present to each other only our best faces. We rarely post things that could lead others to think poorly of us (i.e., we post “self-promotional content”). Like my student’s difficult acquaintance, we all have difficult aspects of our personalities, but we don’t make those public if we want to continue interacting with social networking tools. The witty status updates, the cautiously selected profile pictures, the tidbits of personal data that we provide to our networks are those that we hope will cause others to think well of us. Even text messaging and e-mail – with their lack of spontaneous, unedited interaction – provide fewer opportunities for our more distasteful characteristics to surface.
So what about those difficult personality quirks? What about the opportunities for growth we have in our relationships when we deal with each other and all aspects of our natures, even those uncomfortable characteristics?
For older people and those less active in social networking and other types of online communication, these questions may seem irrelevant. Many people’s online friends are still also those with whom they also interact in person during daily life. But for most of my students – who laughingly admit that they chat online and text message with people in the same room at times – these online modes of relating are the norm. I wonder if the types of interaction among all of their ideal personalities online will reduce their opportunities to learn to have effective relationships, or will alter their methods of growing from their personal relationships.
