Remember the 90s when the everyone worried about how truthful the Internet is? From lonely hearts on chat rooms posing as the hotties they wished the were, to one-person shops referring to themselves as “we” on their About Us page, people took advantage of the early Web Invisibility Cloak to reinvent themselves. New Yorker cartoonist Peter Steiner nailed it in his 1993 cartoon: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

But now, 15 years on, an unexpected shift has happened. Thanks to photo sharing sites, forums, social media sites, and Google indexing every step you make on the web, it’s getting harder to fake it. Your online self is now a more permanent and visible version of your physical self. Your every online utterance, drunken party picture, and speeding ticket is now up there for all to see. You now have 2 reputations to manage: your physical self and your online self.

My friend Ed Kless recently referred me to this excellent article in the New York Times about this phenomenon. An excerpt:

Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.

“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you.”

I’ve been mulling this thought over for the past week, thinking about how little privacy we really have now. It’s interesting that the web has morphed from a D&D fantasy-scape to a gigantic reality show. In a way it’s good, because it forces you to be accountable for all your actions, which (hopefully) makes you act more responsibly, so as not to live with permanent cyber-embarrassment. On the other hand, it makes you wonder where (and if) there will ever be uncharted territory again. It’s human nature to want to escape, to clean your slate, to reinvent yourself. Is it even possible anymore?

Read the NY times article and tell me what you think. Is the web a better place than it was in the beginning?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Someone on my Twitter feed this morning posted this link to a Business Week debate about Twitter. On the anti-Twitter side, Ilise Benun argues:

Twitter is the ultimate in self-centeredness. To imagine that anyone would want a running commentary of every moment of your life puts you—as a businessperson—at the center of your world when in fact that’s where your customer should be. It feeds the isolated narcissist who wants “followers,” rather than live contact with actual customers.

She goes on to say that if you’re tweeting, you’re not communicating in person or doing something in the "real world," which isolates you from people.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I recently ran across a hilarious list of instructions from a 1950s telephone directory from Drumright, Oklahoma. It explains how to get the most out of your telephone service, with tips like "Answer calls promptly. It’s courteous to do so and often keeps the caller from hanging up– thinking you’re not at home." They also recommend in the book to "Use a natural, pleasant voice. Don’t whisper. Don’t shout." (See the whole list.)

This made me recall my friend Madeleine’s classic story of a person who, in the early 90s, once phoned in frustration to her association’s headquarters after being unable to fax a conference form. Turns out she wasn’t actually using a fax machine: she was holding the page up to the computer monitor and slowly "scanning" it my moving it upwards.

It cracks us up to think that people once found routine technology so confounding. And yet, all technology is bewildering to start off with. That’s precisely the way I felt a few weeks ago when I started using Twitter and Facebook. I really had no idea what it was for, how to use it, or why I, never mind any of my clients, needed it. I only started blogging a few months ago, after years of summarily dismissing the whole medium as a self-indulgent exercise in time wastage.

Oh, how quickly things change. Now I’ve set up several clients with blogs, I’ve started Facebooking and Twittering, and I’m becoming a convert of all this new social media stuff. I’m realizing that it was starting to make me look like an old foagie to keep shouting "Get a horse!" 

Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Today I found this free downloadable ebook by Geekpreneur which outlines in simple language why they think Twitter is a great promotional tool for your business. This whole "microblogging" idea is sounding more and more convincing to me the more I read about it. Here’s a synposis:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I discovered Chris Brogan from my recent Twitter experiment. His blog is an excellent resource of ideas, and this is one post that I particularly liked, as I have been trying to figure out how social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook can be beneficial to businesses– both my own, and my clients’.

Check out Chris Brogan’s 50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing. Some ideas I particularly like:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I’ve read so much about Twitter lately that I decided it’s time to give it another shot. Today I logged onto Twitter, had it search for people in my Outlook address book who are members, and fellow HOWie Von Glitschka (illustrator extraordinaire) turned out to be a Twitterer. So I clicked "follow" and he wrote me back and became a follower of mine– kind of exciting!

Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

David read this article in the Dallas Morning News yesterday about another novel use for Twitter: as a play-by-play of what’s happening in Congress with the Republican uprising against Democratic leaders:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I ran across this post by Rick Butts about why he thinks Twitter is better than Google for finding information. The gist of it is that:

• It’s easier to write a plain-English question in Twitter than it is to formulate the perfect search query in Google. (True)
• Twitter is composed of humans answering queries to the best of their abilities, whereas Google is nothing more than an inhuman giant database spitting back search results. (True)
• Twitter can’t be spammed or manipulated through fancy technological tricks (True)

“Just join Twitter and attract a group of followers and you’ll soon you’ll have created your own collection of living brain cells, capable of solving problems, reasoning, understanding fuzzy logic, and developing solutions, and pointing you directly to the answers you seek!”

Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Twitter. It’s all over the news lately and has millions of subscribers. I signed up for an account when I first read about it last year, got confused, then bored, and never did even a single “tweet.”

Twitter is a “microblogging” tool that lets you post very short messages, or “tweets” (140 characters or less) about what you’re doing. You can let your friends know what you’re up to, or let anyone else “follow” you.  And you can post and receive messages via email, IM and cell phone.

But the problem is that most of these short posts are meaningless, time-wasting drivel, which would be fine with me if they weren’t also so crushingly boring. Who on earth wants to read their friend’s dullest moment-by-moment details, never mind the details of dozens of strangers they may be following?

I figured I am probably missing something, in the same way that for years I didn’t get the point of text messaging, and I still don’t get the point of Facebook, Plurk, Pownce and Myspace in the business world. Also, just because boring people write boring things on Twitter doesn’t mean it’s the medium’s fault. So I spent a bit of time googling and thinking about it.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!