Who can we trust?

Can we trust Andy Ihnatko when he claims that no, he is not the Fake Steve Jobs, although FSJ also has humor and uses anglicisms? I am not sure, but I am pretty confident that his haircut is not to Mackey's par.



Self-presentation over the internet really is becoming a complex affair. Who would have thought that venerable institutions such as universities would adapt so fast to the Facebook world of their students? It used to be that what happened outside of the classroom or of school grounds was not the business of Faculty or administrators. Nowadays, though, Facebooks offer interesting peaks to students' "anti-social behaviors" dixit Oxford University's proctors.

Revealing example of the limits of private / public behaviors online and of the ethical dilemmas that those in position of authority (from parents to University's administration and then to potential employers) encounter when dealing with all-pervasive but also confusing and misleading internet information.

Almost there

Do you like his haircut?

At first, things were quite simple. You looked like your mamma and your papa made you, and, change of attire excepted, looked more or less the same in front of your boss, your friends, or your family.

Then came the internet. And, suddenly, you could become anyone you wanted. As Steiner famously noted in his New Yorker cartoon, in 1993, nobody would know if you are a dog. And do people took advantage of this. One of the first instances of clear adoption of a totally new identity was in 1982, in the early days of Compuserve when a male psychiatrist named Sanford Lewin took on the identity of a female neuropsychologyst (insider joke, probably) named Joan. Inconsistencies in Joan's stories had Lewin discovered.
Today, everybody is changing their self-presentation to take full advantage of the mystification allowed by the electronic mediation. Just take a look at random MySpace or Facebooks: everyone looks like an American Apparel model.

Now, stay tuned, because we add another dimension: people falsely pretending to be other people, while having their audience lose their mind over who they really are, offline (if one could say that there still is such a thing as a offline / online boundary, which is another story). Here, of course, the Fake Steve Jobs, hilarious and apparently almost as self-satisfied as the real one, comes to mind.

Last but not least is when our story comes full circle: real people pretending to be other people, but in fact acting for them, really. Hum? The idea is quite simple: imagine that you could hire yourself as your best PR and then inundate the internet with lavish stories of yourself (see the already infamous "I like Mackey's haircut. I think he looks cute!" by Rahoded, the alias used by none other than Mackey himself, WholeFoods' CEO) or criticize your competitors almost with impunity.
And now for the word of the day - because there has to be a word for such a thing, we are talking about the English language lafter all - this behavior is called "sock-pupetting".

Apparently, in the business and political world, the practice is becoming quite common. All right, then, what is left for us to do but play hide and seek with everybody else?

Art as a social experiment

Don't be disappointed, there is no news here: social networking is everywhere. But it has become so much of the talk of the town that we almost forget that there is something real behind. New practices really do emerge.

For instance, we know that social networking applications can change the way people collaborate through a common digital object. It makes writing collaborative. I am actually wondering whether this may be related to older practices of storytelling, when storytelling was pretty much an oral tradition and stories got embroidened after generations and generations of narrators put their touch to them.

Now we also see art becoming more collective, and temporary. Who is to complain about that?

Forget me not

Aficionados know "Forget-me-knot" as the title of the last episode featuring the legendary Emma Peel on the Avengers.

It seemed fitted to choose such a title for this blog. Not only as a tribute to my childhood's favorite TV show, but also as an acknowledgement of a longing for leaving traces onto the internet that many bloggers share.

...As for the flowers, some would call them charming, but sorry Mr Steed, I did not have them in mind while thinking of a title for this blog. How about some Champagne, now, though?

The summer of blog

As I sit down, a little nervously, to write my very first blog entry, the date strikes me: July 1st, 2007. Summer started more than a week ago, but, in my memory, July really is when it kicks in: school is out, it is ok to stay out late, the sun does it too, anyway, and life becomes mellower.

Summer 1967, we are reminded everywhere, was the summer of love. The summer of blog, the incredible ascension of blogs, wikis and all these social networking applications, seems pretty far esthetically, but not necessary in spirit, from the hippie moment. Flowery dresses and unruly beards have been replaced by an improbable nerd fashion. For all its fun and genius in making a virtual reality accessible to all, the wii is no LSD. My knowledge in the latter, it should be said, is inexistent, but isn’t it a part of blogs’ fun to talk occasionally about things that one is less than certain about?

So, what is similar between today’s bloggers and 1967’s hippies? Their belief in a social mission, that of expressing dissent from the majority or the established view. Bloggers’ contrarianism, obviously, is quite scattered: some oppose the hypocrisy of big corporations, others the left and / or the right, others recriminate against recriminators in the subway while others still are merely finding a medium for the expression of their existential angst. The freedom of publishing online just about anything is at once exhilarating and unsettling if not infuriating, especially for people who are used to a world of gatekeepers (Academics, journalists, etc.).

Some could argue that, while hippies created communes and redid the world in social gatherings, today’s bloggers write from the comfort of their own home, or even of their own desk chair. Much has been said about the isolating effect of the Internet. Yet, blogging is no solitary activity: successful bloggers attract comments and attend religiously to their readers. As for wikis, they are downright collaborative, making the lonely process of writing a social experience.

So, here I am, a toe onto the bubbling world of “web 2.0”: as a researcher of these new applications it feels like the beginning of an ethnographic experience: to understand bloggers, thou shall become one. Looks like the ride will be fun.