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stormdogI created a new, very 'plain-vanilla' Facebook profile today.
As part of the oral history work I'm doing, my group is contacting some folks in a Facebook group who are likely to have the kind of experiences and memories we're interested in. In her solicitation for participation, my advisor was going to tag my Facebook account. I pointed out that my profile is a pretty unfiltered summation of me, touching on gender identity, polyamory, and more. That being the case, she thought better of putting a direct link to my profile in a place where such things might be off-putting to potential interviewees.
I have been fortunate enough to be in a position where I feel that my online presence can be pretty unfiltered. I'm not concerned about my family, friends, or employers learning any of these things about me. I mean, I talk about both of my girlfriends with the folks at the archives already. However, as a researcher in the humanities, self-presentation becomes more complicated. I have to begin to weigh my desire to be out in so many ways against my need to develop rapport with the folks who I hope will tell me a lot of personal stories about their lives.
I feel that it's very important for people like me, who are able to be out about some non-normative lifestyle issues, to do so. Getting people to come out of the closet was a major part of the gay rights movement, helping people see that LGBTQ people are not the dangerous other. This is important in other quests for recognition of the legitimacy of things like polyamory or gender plurality. There need to be people who are part of helping transform concepts that are dangerous, distant, and disturbing into concepts that are unremarkable parts of everyday life. We haven't even gotten there with gay/lesbian issues yet, obviously, but we're getting slowly closer. I want to be a part of making things better for other people by making it a little bit easier for them to be accepted for who they are.
At the same time, even my relatively unfiltered presence on social media like Facebook or Livejournal is not my complete self. Entirely apart from the fact that some complicated things don't make it there because I just don't have the time to write them up appropriately, there is of course still an element of impression management in what I write here. Of performativity. My social media self is a curated and processed version of the full-strength Stormdog experience, edited to be a fit for the context it lies within. That being the case, is it so different to create a smaller, differently edited version of myself with which to have interactions that require a certain level of professionally-based consideration?
The fact that qualitative research in the humanities can, I think, make for a fuzzy line between professional and personal behavior complicates things. I think the best kind of interviewing likely comes from mutual sharing of thoughts and feelings. Why should I come in as an outsider and expect my interviewee to do all the giving, while I do all the taking? I want to make a real connection with people and understand where they're coming from in their lives. It's really a big part of why I'm in the field I'm in; I want to know and understand people better.
Maybe it's about choosing battles, and making tactical decisions about how to connect with people. Certainly it's possible to have friendly, persistent relationships with people that don't involve discussions of particular parts of my life. That doesn't mean those relationships are based on false premises, or that I don't honestly care about those people in a real way.
Consciously and unconsciously, we all craft a myriad of images of ourselves - facets of the gem of our personalities, turning ourselves about to ensure that the light is reflecting from the correct one to be seen by the correct viewer. The binary of open sharing of myself on the internet versus a deceptive and selective internet version of myself is a false binary; nearly everything you see of me, and nearly everything I see of you, is representative of a part and not the whole.
To employ one of my favorite quotations, this one from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
As part of the oral history work I'm doing, my group is contacting some folks in a Facebook group who are likely to have the kind of experiences and memories we're interested in. In her solicitation for participation, my advisor was going to tag my Facebook account. I pointed out that my profile is a pretty unfiltered summation of me, touching on gender identity, polyamory, and more. That being the case, she thought better of putting a direct link to my profile in a place where such things might be off-putting to potential interviewees.
I have been fortunate enough to be in a position where I feel that my online presence can be pretty unfiltered. I'm not concerned about my family, friends, or employers learning any of these things about me. I mean, I talk about both of my girlfriends with the folks at the archives already. However, as a researcher in the humanities, self-presentation becomes more complicated. I have to begin to weigh my desire to be out in so many ways against my need to develop rapport with the folks who I hope will tell me a lot of personal stories about their lives.
I feel that it's very important for people like me, who are able to be out about some non-normative lifestyle issues, to do so. Getting people to come out of the closet was a major part of the gay rights movement, helping people see that LGBTQ people are not the dangerous other. This is important in other quests for recognition of the legitimacy of things like polyamory or gender plurality. There need to be people who are part of helping transform concepts that are dangerous, distant, and disturbing into concepts that are unremarkable parts of everyday life. We haven't even gotten there with gay/lesbian issues yet, obviously, but we're getting slowly closer. I want to be a part of making things better for other people by making it a little bit easier for them to be accepted for who they are.
At the same time, even my relatively unfiltered presence on social media like Facebook or Livejournal is not my complete self. Entirely apart from the fact that some complicated things don't make it there because I just don't have the time to write them up appropriately, there is of course still an element of impression management in what I write here. Of performativity. My social media self is a curated and processed version of the full-strength Stormdog experience, edited to be a fit for the context it lies within. That being the case, is it so different to create a smaller, differently edited version of myself with which to have interactions that require a certain level of professionally-based consideration?
The fact that qualitative research in the humanities can, I think, make for a fuzzy line between professional and personal behavior complicates things. I think the best kind of interviewing likely comes from mutual sharing of thoughts and feelings. Why should I come in as an outsider and expect my interviewee to do all the giving, while I do all the taking? I want to make a real connection with people and understand where they're coming from in their lives. It's really a big part of why I'm in the field I'm in; I want to know and understand people better.
Maybe it's about choosing battles, and making tactical decisions about how to connect with people. Certainly it's possible to have friendly, persistent relationships with people that don't involve discussions of particular parts of my life. That doesn't mean those relationships are based on false premises, or that I don't honestly care about those people in a real way.
Consciously and unconsciously, we all craft a myriad of images of ourselves - facets of the gem of our personalities, turning ourselves about to ensure that the light is reflecting from the correct one to be seen by the correct viewer. The binary of open sharing of myself on the internet versus a deceptive and selective internet version of myself is a false binary; nearly everything you see of me, and nearly everything I see of you, is representative of a part and not the whole.
To employ one of my favorite quotations, this one from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
