Authenticity

In this week’s course, we talked about social media and the Digital Humanities. Therefor we read Manovich’s paper “Trending: the promises and the challenges of big social data”. He argued that “the emergence of social media in the middle of the 2000’s created opportunities to study social and cultural processes and dynamics in new ways”. The huge amount of social media data bridges the gap between surface data and deep data. With surface data Manovich aims at the data about lots of people, gathered with surveys in most cases and statistically analyzed. Deep data on the other hand, are data about few people, gathered through observation or extensive interviewing for example. But Manovich also made four objections to this very optimistic idea about the opportunities of social media data.

One of his objections (and one that was also mentioned during class) was that we cannot consider social media data as authentic. “These are not a transparant window into people’s imaginations, intentions, motifs, opinions, and ideas. It’s more appropriate to think of it as an interface people present to the world.” Our online life and behavior doesn’t mirror our offline behavior. It’s like the online version of ourself is a more idealized one.

That’s also what a team of researchers found. Bessière, Seay and Kiesler surveyed 51 players of World of Warcraft via e-mail. They saw that the respondent’s avatar resembled more their ideal self than their actual self (the avatar was more extravert, less neurotic and more conscientious). This was even more true for people who felt more depressed or had a lower self-esteem. For those people the discrepancy between their actual self and their avatar was bigger. Our real life personality thus influences our online presentation. If we feel happy, we don’t feed the need to fake. So, on- and offline behaviors are clearly related.

But the question remains how authentic are online presentations are. You could say they are absolutely not authentic. It doesn’t resemble our offline self. You couldn’t say that all our Facebook and Instagram pictures mirror reality, especially not after the recent confession of blogster Essena O’Neill who admitted she was frequently posing for two hours to get the perfect picture.

But I was thinking that maybe our posts and pictures do reflect our aspirations and imaginations. They resemble who we WANT to be. In that sense, our online behavior is authentic. Maybe even more authentic…  Also the anonymity the world wide web offers, makes it possible to be often more honest than you would be in real life. I sometimes google something, instead of asking someone, because it’s an embarrasing question.

The point is that we can derive lots of insights from social media data, but we have to be cautious. Not only do we have to question the authenticity, but we also need to be aware of the people behind the data when we generalize our findings. Don’t say for example: “the Belgian population is frightened” based on Twitter-data only. The typical Twitter users are young and well-educated, but that’s only a subset of Belgium.

Humans stay crucial to interpret and use the data!