Our online lives.

I know it’s hard to believe, but we didn’t have internet at home until around 2008. Technically it happened because we were kind of lazy and my main passion was reading books on paper back then, but when I was younger, we used to get DVD’s of animated movies to watch at home in Bangladesh. I wonder if current generation has ever seen a DVD or not to be honest considering it’s the age of streaming. But here it goes :

Then after getting the internet, I was introduced to Facebook and that was my first exposure to social networks. I was not really active in social media ever in the beginning except for the sake of playing quiz style games in Facebook. I hated Farmville from the beginning. Facebook was mostly used for photo sharing with friends. I still remember searching for Final Fantasy Advent Children AMV’s for the first time with my sister. It was the death scene of Jack Fair if anyone’s interested.

I don’t know how many of the current generation teenagers will admit it, but I spent most of my time on internet from 2008–2011 reading fanfiction stories in Fanfiction.net along with my sister. I always was interested in reading things, whether online or offline and for that searching for ‘cool content’ was one of my interests from the beginning. This lead to my eventual discovery of Fanfiction.net, Pulse, Flipboard, Quora, Reddit, Vox, The Verge, Pandodaily,LinkedIn Pulse and Medium.

We got introduced to the fanfiction lingo very fast. There are numerous slangs AU(Alternate universe), crossover(when characters from one story goes to visit another by some unexplainable phenomenon), fluff(light hearted romance), yaoi, yuri, lemon(mostly sexual stuff), OC(original character) etc. It was a totally new sort of world. In real life, we had ID’s in school, a role number and our current parent given names and identities were constrained by our background and society. Online, we could pretend to be anything.

I noticed the digital lives projected by us online has a lot of overlap with our real lives even back then. A regular girl from real world can pretend to be an original character, a real kickass heroine inside a fanfic. In the fanfiction community,authors tend to make their pseudonames, interact with each other in the world. Sometimes they would even insert themselves inside the stories to fall in love with some character they like or even do crossovers to someone else’s story.

I had a suspicion that most fanfiction are basically ‘escapist’, authors wanted to go to a digital world where they could explore parts of their personalities that they couldn’t do anywhere else in real life. That suspicion got confirmed after I read Neil Gaiman’s quote :

“Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different….As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.” 
― Neil Gaiman

But our online lives can’t be reduced to mere fiction. Second Life, a virtual gaming community where everyone can have an avatar, is similar to fanfiction world because they have similar features such as pseudonames, classic avaters and perhaps made up persona’s.

I had a few made up stories in my head about being a character in different stories, but I never wrote them up because I was too serious for that. A typical female fanfiction author’s profile looks something like this :

Adults will probably laugh it off and think that she’s not a ‘real writer’ for writing fanfiction. It’s true that she has not shared her real name, but she has shared her real life interests. May be she’s a super shy girl in real life who does not get much attention, who knows, but online, she claims to be ‘fabulous’!(and we hope she is)

Teenagers create their online lives inside Snapchat(2011), WhatsApp(2009) these days. I was the Facebook generation, born before 1997, Facebook(2004), Youtube(2005), Twitter(2006), Google+(2011) came when my cousin was born in 2004. Snapchat is the ‘cool thing’ for now, Twitter is getting hate for lousy growth , and Facebook is dead for a subclass of teenagers.

I missed the boat of Instagram and still catching up to that by posting my cat pics. I ended up in Quora from 2013 and became a top writer there from 2014–2016(straight 3 years) for writing. This was my first exposure to a public online community where I had to earn reputation by some skill as good answers resulted in higher credibility. I started writing in Medium from 2015. I’ve never written under a pseudoname ever because I wanted to be authentic, public and open. I ended up sharing my articles at Twitter because it seemed like a good distribution channel. I hated Reddit in the beginning but later started appreciating the comment wars.

I even went so far as to take up MOOC’s on social network analysis. Stanford has a very good one by leading network theorist Matthew Jackson in Coursera. Algorithmist Jon Kleinberg had a good one in Edx. But theory only goes so far, it’s people who make up our communities, whether online or offline. If we want to understand ourselves and keep track of how we benefit from our online lives, how the networks really operate, we should learn more theory but if we want to think at a practical level about how we should integrate our private lives with public one’s, we need to look inwards.

I never felt the need to separate my online life from the offline world before. I’ve so many great friends whom I’ve met strictly online first, whether Quora or Facebook. But recently I’ve started feeling very different, very restless. Friends, followers, upvotes, likes, favorites, hearts-all of the mechanisms for keeping us addicted to networks are great because they tend to serve some real need.

In Quora, upvotes give our answers distribution to bigger communities because high quality answers tend to get upvoted more. Likes reflect who’s popular in our network. Favorites are used by our Twitter followers to show that our microthoughts are well liked. Reddit has to use upvote/downvote to surface great links. Being ‘friends’ with someone in Facebook is an open invitation to them to be included in your life, specially for someone as open as me who tend to keep most of my posts public.

The line between real world and digital lives is getting blurrier over time. We date online, we ask for taxis online, we buy and sell stuff online, we even have our profiles online after our death. All of us has a ‘personal brand’ now, Google makes our searches customized for our tastes, Amazon shows us the products ‘we’ would want to buy, Netflix recommends us the movies and TV shows we would want to watch, Quora shows me the content that I’ll like.Some people say this data sharing is bad but I think it’s more convenient for us. danah boyd ended up writing “It’s complicated : The Social Lives of Networked Teens” after analyzing people from our age, it’s a must read for anyone who’s into further exploration.

But this is not the whole story, at least for me. Recently, I’ve started feeling the need for being more private as sometimes I feel ‘judged’ by other people in my network. There are debates on both sides of the issue. Some people say social media makes us more depressed, other parties have research evidence that social media makes us feel better when we connect to people we like instead of comparing ourselves to other people and post actively.

In my specific case, it came as a shocking realization. Suddenly, it seemed nearly all of my real world activities are documented online. I’ve written about the stories of my life in numerous Quora answers and currently in Medium articles. I’ve whitewashed myself in many cases, I’ve behaved like a dick in other cases. I tend to share my goals publicly so that I stay as more accountable.

I had a feeling that this is making me more constrained. It’s true that sharing goals publicly creates more accountability, but it comes with the expense of flexibility. What if I want to switch my goals suddenly and take on something less prestigious than my current ones? Would the same network that was cheering me up first would think that I’ve become a loser later? Is there even room for private failures and lonely reflective nights if I feel the habitual need to share? When I share ideas with other people, how much accountability do I have with them? If someone ever shares my ideas for wrong purposes, what would I do then? If I accidentally share something inappropriate about someone I know, do I have some sort of responsibility there? Where is the line between privacy vs authenticity?

I hated people(specially adults)who seemed hypocritical online in the beginning. I felt they were ‘too conscious’ of their reputation and consistently whitewashed their characters. Every word they said online felt like a lie. Everyone seemed to run around with a 2 minute pitch for a ‘quick sell’ to other people. The ‘personal branding’ related advice has completely invaded our lives already. Other peoples sufferings are basically ‘realistic drama’s’ for us now at a level. Upworthy even has to make meaningful stories cooler by adding click-bait headlines with it to make them ‘viral’.

Sadly, now I feel the behaviors that we converge to tend to be created in response to a need. It’s just a very organic procedure. After we start sharing online, over time, we want to share better things. When we end up making better things, we want to reach better distribution. More distribution means we have to appeal to a bigger audience. A bigger audience means our private information is at risk of being exploited so we have to become more private. Being more private leads to more secrecy. After enjoying secrecy for a while, we become even more careful about sharing online and we only want to show our best faces.

The public identity we have online is static. It does not have the same mood fluctuations, tiredness, fatigue, anxiousness our real life has. In our real life, we have a whole physical body and a whole range of physical expressions which online profiles can’t really capture. Still this private identity of ours always interacts, overlaps with our public profile. May be we edit ourselves a lot in our online profiles, still, it is our identity. The words that we choose to describe ourselves are carefully selected by us, even if we don’t have the non-verbal unsaid things up there. Our browsing habits probably has a lot of information about us too scattered around multiple websites.

I’ve no idea whether I want to be a private person or not, or even if there’s a need for that or not. May be I’m just overreacting. But I do hope that I’d be able to reconcile the level of authenticity I can bring offline into my online life without feeling judged later. Each person has to choose for themselves how they want their identities to interact with each other.