Long time ago I was sunken into high temperature and was dreaming nightmares. One of them was about multiple egos. It was about four o’clock in the morning and everything that previously supposed to be single, exploded into four separate parallel parts. I was turning from side to side in fever trying to perceive those parts united, but I was not conscious enough to glue romantic idealist, libertine adventurer, artistic soul, and boring nerd together.
I learned at University that a human being can be viewed from different perspectives:
- What you are in reality.
- How you see yourself.
- How others see you.
- How you believe others see you.
Also I would add these:
- How others believe you see yourself.
- How others believe you believe others see you.
Dream further! You are not interesting that much to anybody except yourself… 
In general, it’s worth understanding that how you feel yourself, how you pose, and how you look to others – these are all different images.
I remember a friend Mindaugas from my childhood who was the first person in my life communicating with friends differently than with parents. He was a naughty madcap among his friends, but exemplary polite son at home. Was that double-facedness or just integration?
Moral standards teach you to be yourself everywhere, and that is set off against hypocrisy which tends to be a bad feature. Unfortunately being yourself directly means staying the same as people expect you to be with all your faults, imperfections, and inabilities. What if it’s possible to stay yourself even being different with different people? What if being yourself is not important?
“Which of my images is the real one?” Juste got confused once.
“You are real with all your images!” I noticed.
Some writer Kurt Vonnegut wrote this:
We are what we pretend to be…
or so to say paraphrased:
Fake it until you make it.
In essence, we can be anyone we want, we just need to work on that (ok, maybe some people have better skills to achieve some goals, whereas others have better skills to achieve other goals).
Why is it important to be able to change? That’s because of recognition within groups of people who are important to you. Nobody likes to be alienated. Even those who are pushed away from the mainstream, gather together to groups of abandoned.
Alternatives also belong to groups. All in all, mainstream and alternatives are two opposed groups which are easy to understand for superficial-thinking ones. The world consists of many subcultures and one person might belong to several of them. Even if you feel being an original individualist, you still belong to a group of individualists walking on this planet somewhere among 6 billion people. Being anonymous is also one of the images.
During Rocío’s birthday we noticed this almost unanimously:
Even if you stay at home alone on Saturday evening crying about your miserable life, you still belong to a group of people who don’t go anywhere on Saturday evenings crying about their miserable lives.
Belongings to some groups define personal identity. I am Lithuanian, hacker, blogger, inline-skater, unfortunate game developer, party guy, workaholic, traveler, artist, aristocrat… Because I am from Lithuania, I think about security holes all the time, I live in blogosphere, I belonged to the club of Vilnius’ inline-skaters, etc.
By belonging to a group, a person automatically adds a label to himself, which in some cases might be inappropriately interpreted by other people.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
With the growth of internet and social networking, self branding became accessible to everyone, not only to the famous ones. Depending on how you represent yourself online, you can be successful or unsuccessful at work or personal life (actually, even before internet, people cared what others thought about them). In order not to get alienated in a group, you need to integrate there. You need to learn the context, take up with it, and by the values of people within the context, find a way to stand out to achieve what you want.
For example, it’s right to start a thread about design patterns in programmers’ forum, it’s right to tell stories about creepy hitch-hiking adventures in a group of travelers, it’s right to show a new skating trick to inline-skaters, it’s right to dive into the ecstasy of flirting and intimacy during a date… But usually it’s not right to mix everything. Everything is in its place and time. All different groups of people have different contexts and you have to adapt yourself to them, unless your purpose is to be distinguished radically and to gain everybody’s attention (until your pranks become boring).
So we all fall under statistics. Businesses use that while searching for target groups. One thing to remember that it’s not always right to put the whole person to the target group. Only specific part related to specific activity can get to the target group. And the parts change in time.
For example, by measuring time, I am 5% of clubber, 12% of web socializer, 27% of programmer, 33% of sleeper(1), and the rest 23% of spontaneous activist and daily-chores doer. So my time distribution at the moment is as shown, but it differs from what there was and what there will be, not necessarily depending on age, but rather on interests and priorities in the surrounding environment.
Regarding online social networks, it is important
- to provide a possibility for people to create groups by interest.
- to provide a possibility to restrict access to data which should be reached only by a specific group.
I would propagate the openness of information, but then I remember the example at a presentation that a young teacher in New York might not want her under-age students and their parents to see wild-party photos of her gay friends. So everyone should be able to choose how much publicity he wants.
You can look at yourself or the other one as at different parts, or as the whole, or as a part of a whole; and you will be always right. The other question is for what purposes you will use that?
(1) Once again, I declare an outrage that I spend one third of my life just by sleeping! Why are living-beings so non-effective!? There would be so many interesting things to do during that time! BTW, there are some signs sprayed on the walls in Berlin saying “Sleep is commercial”. But that is already another story..
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