25/​M/​S or Maybe Not

via Richard Sambrook and David Brain, here’s a great present­a­tion from the Lift con­fer­ence, given by Genevieve Bell, who works as an anthro­po­lo­gist at Intel:

It’s about how we all lie online in terms of the way we present ourselves, or rather, that we’ve been lying about ourselves for an awful long time — how we feel, how we feel about our partners and jobs, our height, weight and age, for example — and this hasn’t changed just because tech­no­logy has speeded up. According to psy­cho­lo­gists, we tell between six and 200 lies a day in order to socialise (‘I’m fine’), for play and fun, to hide mis­be­ha­viour, feel safer, feel private, feel better about the world for ourselves and to try to be more popular. There are lots of good (and bad) reasons to dissemble.

Lying is a bad thing for society, of course, as every major religion agrees. Though, on second thoughts, our culture does allow for things like white lies, keeping secrets and pre­serving our privacy, all of which are seen as good things by-​​and-​​large but which normally involve decep­tion. Our actual practice means that decep­tion is implicit to our social existence.

New inform­a­tion tech­no­lo­gies that attempt to insist on personal trans­par­ency don’t really fit with our lying culture or our bio­lo­gical needs. There are con­flicts between our cultural prac­tises and our cultural ideals, and while we can work round those in meat­space, dealing with machines tends to expose those con­flicts. (“Date of Birth?” on the regis­tra­tion screens of a service is a good example.)

Twitter, according to Bell, is about making an art out of con­fab­u­la­tion. The con­struc­tion of a life­style we present is both a bio­lo­gical neces­sity and a work of art in its entirety. On Twitter, you are allegedly telling the world ‘what are you doing right now?’. But I did a little search on Twitter for ‘having a wank’ (sorry, mum) and the lack of any direct matches would seem to support Bell’s contention.

I haven’t seen this subject addressed before and found the present­a­tion fas­cin­ating. I am troubled by the idea that trans­par­ency is coming to be seen as a moral neces­sity. It’s like the web 2.0 equi­valent of Daily Mail readers saying, “you wouldn’t object to CCTV if you had nothing to hide.” As indi­viduals, hiding, privacy, con­fab­u­la­tion, ima­gin­a­tion and play are pretty important to mental health, I think. This is one reason why people are very con­cerned about who they let into their Facebook circle of friends. Facebook insists on people using their real names and thus makes it impossible to hide dif­ferent circles and dif­ferent personae from each other, the way you can offline. Facebook makes it impossible to lie, and that is arguably mentally damaging.

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• The Consequences of Counting
• Generation Y is Generation We
• Foucault – the lot of you