ego.istic.org

Philosophers, psychologists, and artists have all being going on about personæ for quite a while. The OED's first citation for “persona” in the sense of “The aspect of a person's character that is displayed to or perceived by others” is from 1902, and Jung, it seems, wrote of the narrower psychological sense from 1917. I think there can be few people nowadays who disagree that we each present a different face to different sets of acquaintances, that one is a different person to one's parents than one is to one's old friends, and different again than one is to one's colleagues.

To me, this seems to be for two main reasons. One is that personality is somewhat like a mirror. When you meet someone, you react to their personality, and relate to them in a manner according to that. You both reach a sort of compromise over such issues as familiarity and dialect/idiom, and this compromise ends up in a different place for each relationship.

The other is that one's innate or natural personality develops over time and with experience. Meeting a new person essentially freezes your personality into a persona, so while you might relate to that person the same way five years later, another new person will get a snapshot of your five-years-older personality. (Even if you're one of those hardcore psychologists who don't believe there is really anything behind all the masks, consider that the compromise described above relies on each person having a starting point to negotiate from. Call this the personality.)

Erik H. Erikson, who spent much of his career worrying about adolescence, believed that this second reason was a major factor in why growing up is so hard: while the child is trying hard to construct a new, adult, personality for himself, his family, teachers, &c. are still relating to the childish personality he is trying to discard. He even suggests that the Wanderjahr, or “gap year” in modern parlance, is both a way of seeing lots of rôle models that the childhood environment may be missing, and a way of experimenting with new personalities on people with no expectations of continuity.

Of course, if you introduce your friends to your family, say, then the personæ clash. When these two sets of people talk about you, they are really talking about different personæ, and it can be strange for them to see how they have only seen you from one angle, like the old parable about the blind men describing an elephant. And the poor person in the middle is left confused, not knowing which persona should be in effect. The whole system only works because we usually manage to keep these worlds separate.

Every schoolchild knows this, though they might not manage to put it into quite these words. They know that when mummy kisses them on the cheek to see them off at the school gates, it's embarrassing. They know that when their parents stop to talk to friends they meet on the street, the parents become different people for that time. For adults, it may be less of an everyday issue — or perhaps they merely grow accustomed to it and stop noticing — but they still appreciate that they might not like their boss to meet their drinking buddies.

Many good dramas have been written about this kind of situation; the first that comes to mind is Alan Bennett's ‘The Laying On of Hands’, which is about a man who dies, and all his various sets of acquaintances meet at his funeral, and a representative of each gives a eulogy: the eulogies all disagree about the character of the dead man (who never appears), except on one point, which turns out to be wrong.

Given how many people have thoroughly exercised themselves on this issue, and how much a part of being a social animal, I was taken aback when a prominent computer scientist was talking to me a few months ago, and he was very excited about how social network services like Facebook are causing problems for people who find their parents, bosses, &c. can find out things about them that they didn't want them to know, and how today's hip teenagers are developing all kinds of strategies to cope with this. He genuinely believed that this was an exciting new social phenomenon of the Internet Age.

To my mind, the chief failing of such websites has been in failing to provide proper persona support. The stated purpose of them is to facilitate introductions, that one can find new acquaintances who share a friend with you and some common interest; set aside for a moment that Facebook in particular is rarely used in this way.

Traditionally, such introductions have been in the hands of the mutual friend. If I have a childhood friend who is interested in changing career to journalism, I am likely to know this, and if I happen to have the same local as a journalist, I might ask him if he is willing to be introduced to my friend and give him some advice. It may be a one-off meeting, or it may blossom and turn out that these two separate friends merge into the same circle of friends; either way, the introduction, and the initial accommodation of my personæ to this situation, is under my control.

But, when we automate this process of friend-of-friend discovery, the mutual friend loses his ability to mediate. Now, assuming I'm willing to enter my information into the Huge Friendship Graph, my drug dealer can deliver this week's stash via another of his clients who works in the same office, or my brother can find and join my ‘continental’ cinema club, or my parents can email my best friend and tell him to make sure I eat properly because they worry about me.

One of the maxims of systems analysis is that when computerising a system, you should respect the conventions and the procedures of the existing system. Even if you think that the computer makes some steps unnecessary, or enables a whole new way of doing things, you really don't want to try to implement this at the same time as completely replacing the system: mistakes will be made, people will fail to spot important considerations, and you can't change back easily. If there is a new way of working, you can do it later. But social network services are not designed or run by systems analysts, psychologists, or even anthropologists. They are run by entrepreneurs, who are more focused on generating ‘buzz’, eyeballs on their website, media coverage, customer lock-in, and revenue.

The result is that we arrive in a surprising state, where the Internet, the communication medium where you don't know anything about the real identity of the people you meet, and where you can have as many personæ as you like and keep them as separate as you like, is combined with real-world interpersonal relationships, in which sophisticated and mature persona-separation techniques exist, to form a social network formalisation which has vastly inferior multiple persona support. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Maybe in five or ten years the same artists who previously would have based their dramas on people's pasts catching up with them, or their farces on the unfortunate hero going to increasingly silly lengths to keep people from meeting, will instead find 21st Century equivalents. I can't wait for the hilarious story of a young man rushing to delete incriminating material from his MySpace profile before his prospective spouse's strait-laced father finds it. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that the greatest film of the coming century could be the story of a journalist who tries to produce the life story of a recently deceased newspaper magnate but after weeks of Googling can't find the one piece of information he really wants; unbeknownst to him, we see in the last shot the deceased's LiveJournal account being deleted, and for only a few frames, there scrolls past an early rant where the author was so angry he mistyped his subject, “Rosebdu”.