Happy New Year to all – I’ve had a nice break and its good to be back to work/writing/etc. For my first post of the new year I thought I might share a few stories that have come my way.
- The New York Times on impression management – Features interviews with a number of scholars in the field.
- NPR segment on privacy and identity on the social web – This likely made a few people a little paranoid.
- Scobleversy! – Blogger Scobelizer has been put in Facebook limbo since they caught him screen-scraping. Researchers are all too familiar with this. Nick Carr looks into the real issue here.
- Cathy Davidson on Piaget, Vygotsky and Club Penguin.
Finally, I’ve talked to a few people today about the impersonation of Bilawal Bhutto Zardar. Reporters have been long turning to social networks for news stories, often for supporting or illustrative information presented as fact, simply because a profile looks real. This is a journalistic gray area, and I enjoyed the opinion of Barbara Friedman and Meredith Golden in Sunday’s N&O.
Is a social network profile fact because it is a nexus of activity? If it appears real, is it real? This is a core problem with online identity and our more offline notions of fixity. Is a profile about me even if I didn’t create it (but say, I’m mourned there?) And what are the editorial standards in reporting content from SNS, where identity is ambiguous at best? I’m very surprised that the Bhutto story made it by an editor; to me, that is a journalistic failure and should not be explained away as a “ruse.”
Tags: identity, social networks
