thoughtfulI think everyone online has an aspect of "persona" to them, if only because ideally, on the internet, you have the opportunity to think before you press "submit." Not everyone does, but the option is still there, for all of us. We filter out certain aspects of ourselves: the faces we present to the world are not exactly one-to-one identical to the faces we present in private. I'm a little wittier on the internet, because I never have to deal with l'esprit d'escalier. On the internet, it doesn't matter that I can't pronounce l'esprit d'escalier (my French pronunciation is so bad it's comical).
I swear a little less on the internet, because I have to think about the process of typing out the word. "Shut your fucking face, you fucking fucker" rolls trippingly off the tongue, but it doesn't fall quite so easy from the fingers. I don't usually document how many times I need to pee. And yeah, since I come from the "do not air your dirty laundry in public" school of thought, I can come off as a bit of a perpetual Marilyn Munster when I really tend to flux between being a Marilyn and being a Wednesday. I let my cynicism off the leash sometimes, but I've found that it's more effective when I don't live and breathe in a haze of grumpy.
Also, I really am inappropriately enthusiastic about everything. Soda. Movies. Commercials that I really like. Street pennies. Peeing. I love peeing! I mean, I don't pee on trees or anything, but I really like it when I go into the bathroom feeling uncomfortable, and come out feeling a-okay. Plus it's an excuse to sit and read, and who doesn't love that? People who are around me in the real world are likely to get treated to a constant stream of alternatingly perky and snarlingly homicidal sound bytes. "Gosh, trees are nice, I like trees I WILL DESTROY ALL WHO THWART ME do you think maybe we should go back to Disneyland in October SOMEONE ON THE INTERNET IS WRONG RARRRRRHGHGHGHGH oh hey juice." Most of these things never make it online, because they're fleeting impulses, or because I don't feel like providing an ocean of context to make them make sense.
I guess that's really where internet persona comes in, at least for me: I make more sense online. I have less visible downtime, I'm a little less random, and I'm a little more measured with my swearing. I'm just as perky, and just as cranky, it's just not a twenty-four/seven thing. It's really important to me that I not be artificial online, because I spend so much time interacting with people offline, and I don't want to be reading from a script every time I do a public appearance. (Although that would be hysterical. I should write a "being Seanan at a book signing script," and start tapping people to stand in for me while I go to get myself another soda.) Filtered doesn't mean shallow, and thoughtful doesn't mean fake.
On the balance of things, I think you can tell whether or not you'd like me in person from listening to me online, as long as you remember that there's a whole third dimension offline, and that I can sometimes use that third dimension to run into traffic after red balloons, or produce seemingly random frogs. And I find that pretty cool.
Thoughts?
(*Who will not be named here, you know the drill, and everyone has the right to an opinion.)
June 20 2012, 23:16:04 UTC 5 years ago
I agree with most of this, with a couple of caveats: I don't think it's necessarily accurate to label a persona as artificial, and I think the commenter's mistake is in failing to recognize that you have not one online persona, but several -- all of which have counterparts in the outside world.
I'm reminded in particular -- notably by a comment posted a couple of friends-lists over from here -- of the glory days of the SFRT (aka "Science Fiction RoundTable") on GEnie. [Quick history lesson for the gallery: GEnie existed back in the days of CompuServe and Prodigy and first-gen AOL, and was very much like a really structured dial-up verson of LiveJournal. The SFRT was far and away the busiest of many subject-oriented RoundTables, attracting legions of posters -- fans and pro SF/F writers alike.]
On GEnie, the authors and fen both often had personas (personae?), sometimes more than one. Susan Shwartz, author of numerous excellent novels, was the Green-Eyed Kzin, occasional wielder of the Sacred Salmon of Correction. Esther Friesner, author ditto, was Mome of the High Church of Chocolate, Mistress of Cheeblemancy, and sometimes Auntie Esther, advice columnist to the clue-challenged. Various Bay Area writers and fen created the Clan Borgia, devoted equally to elegant parties (mostly imaginary) and elegantly subtle poisons (always imaginary). And I invented the persona of a sales-agent and wielder of deus ex machina powers as a means of (pretending to) maintain order among the virtual parties and the cattle raids.
A good many of these personas were purely online inventions, used for extended (and often hilarious) bouts of interactive storytelling. Just now, though, I'm most drawn to Esther Friesner's personas, because she had several, more than one of which developed real-world lives. I'm not certain now which came first, but "Auntie Esther" existed both on GEnie and -- for at least a couple of years -- in the pages of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. As to cheeblemancy: "cheeble!", the cry of the Enraged War Hamster, originated online, via Esther's tales of Huey the Oracular Hamster (a real household pet). Likewise, the art of cheeblemancy was invented on GEnie but evolved into a charitable fund-raising exercise that Esther took to a number of real-life SF conventions.
I'd submit that just as there were several virtual Esthers on GEnie back in the day, there are several virtual Seanans inhabiting the present LJ. There's writer-Seanan, who posts word counts on novels and monthly current-project reports. There's advice-columnist Seanan, who posts Comic-Con survival guides and 50-things-about-writing essays. There's fangirl-Seanan, who posts about the X-Men and My Little Ponies and Stephen King and James Gunn and the amazing YA novels she's been reading lately. There's musical Seanan, who posts song lyrics and releases albums with some of the songs on them. And there is sometimes tired Seanan, who posts when the spoon drawer is running low and the various other Seanans are out on break. It's just that you have and maintain more personae than most of us do -- and also that yours occasionally (and inevitably, considering the numbers involved) bleed into one another to some degree.
And they are also, as you observe, all you. That's both like and unlike many of the GEnie-personas of yore. Mostly, Susan's Green-Eyed Kzin was an affectation marked by a certain elegantly dangerous politeness, which might manifest either online or off; OTOH, the Clan Borgia and my own Senior Field Agent were essentially role-playing characters.
And there, again, is where your commenter loses his way; not only is he not distinguishing among your several personas, he's wrongly assuming that some of them are conscious inventions rather than essential aspects of the larger Seanan.
June 22 2012, 15:26:29 UTC 5 years ago