'Meaningful actions exist because we find or impose patterns on the specific behaviours we observe or otherwise learn about. The patterns are constructions, but once generated, they are maintained because they disambiguate reality and thereby provide coherent understanding and a stable platform for subsequent thought and behaviour. Because they are constructions, however, they can admit to tremendous variability across people and contexts. Hence, the certainty of action that exists for each individual embedded in a particular context coexists with the uncertainty of action across individuals and contexts. That said, there is one metric for disambiguating action that seems solid and reflects a shared reality. The multiple act identities for an action tend to be organized in a hierarchical manner. A simple criterion is useful for sorting an action's multiple identities into a hierarchy: One act identity is higher-level than another identity if it makes sense to say that one does the former by doing the latter. -- ...when two or more plausible identities are available, people are inclined to choose the identity that provides the most comprehensive understanding of what they are doing, plan to do, or have done. -- #Social Influence: The influence agent first induces the target to consider the relevant action in concrete, low-level terms. Simply describing the action in terms of its details can induce low-level identification, as can presenting the target with a surplus of concrete information regarding the action. From this low-level state, the target experiences a heightened press for coherence. On his or her own, the target might emerge with a higher-level identity that reflects past perspectives or perhaps one that reflects a new integration. But if the influence agent offers a message that provides the missing integration before the target has demonstrated emergence on his or her own, the target may embrace this message as an avenue of emergent understanding, even if it conflicts with his or her prior conception.'

'Compared with low-level agents, high-level agents express a more internal locus of control, report more stability and consistency in their actions across contexts, and have clearer and more stable self-concepts. By contrast, low-level agents report acting more impulsively and describe their actions with less reference to mental states. The tendency to identify one’s actions at higher levels then may be indicative of an awareness of one’s own mind as a cause of behavior. -- Mentalizing incorporates subprocesses whereby the perceiver infers the existence of mental states, internal events, and other features of agents from external cues or from a personal simulation of the other’s experience... The tendency to mentalize in adults has been examined in studies of empathy, perspective-taking, emotion recognition and attribution, and knowledge estimation....mentalization is a continuum. At the lowest end of the continuum is the failure to attribute mental states to an agent, which might be called dementalizing. Thought, emotion, and intention are not inferred or are ignored. A perceiver can dementalize a person by explaining the person’s actions in terms of physical events, preexisting dispositions, or causal chains that do not require a mind.'

'Mentalization is the process by which an observer views a target as possessing higher cognitive faculties such as goals, intentions and desires. Mentalization can be assessed using action identification paradigms, in which observers choose mentalistic (goals-focused) or mechanistic (action-focused) descriptions of targets’ actions. Typically, healthy adults mentalize liked others more than disliked others... This discrepancy is reflected in discrepancies in action identification across targets. Liked
targets’ actions are consistently identified at higher levels than disliked targets’... This suggests that mentalization as assessed by action identification tasks varies as a function of the observer’s impression of the actor. Activation in several regions increased when participants considered the actions of disliked targets. These regions included the bilateral dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral anterior insula and right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. These are regions consistently associated with negative emotions such as disgust, anger and pain...'

'People change their conceptions of what they are doing either by moving from a higher level to a lower one, or by moving from a lower level to a higher one. This means that in moving from one high-level conception of an action to another, the person must necessarily pass through a transitional state in which the specifics of the action come to mind. This formulation indicates that when people hold a fairly comprehensive and general conception of what they are doing, that conception will serve as an intention to act and will remain unperturbed by suggestions that the act has some alternative general identity. Thus, the theory explains why people are not always willing to believe it when someone suggests to them a new high-level conception of their action. It is only when people come to identify an action in terms of its details that they lose sight of their initial high-level understanding of the act and become susceptible to information indicating that the act can be identified in another high-level way.'

'If successfully enacted, an action tends to be identified at a relatively high level; if unsuccessfully enacted, it tends to be identified in lower-level terms. ...in the face of failure, the actor is likely to think about the action in more mechanistic terms. -- ...the extension of action identification principles to the communication of action allows for a certain "coyness" in self-presentation. Rather than boasting of one's personal competence, a person might nonetheless communicate this image of himself or herself through high-level identities. And rather than admitting failure or explaining it away, one can simply (and honestly) describe what one has done in mechanistic terms, thereby circumventing the presentation of oneself as incompetent. Finally, one can cultivate an image of modesty in the eyes of others by describing action-even successful action-in relatively low-level terms.'

'...people identify the actions they perform at the highest level they can.' -- Links to PDF papers

Action Identification: High/Why vs Low/How: "We have meaning and significance at the high levels of identification... When you focus at low levels there's less self-relevance to what you're doing." -- Being vs Doing

"When you're a baby, your parents are substitutes for your pre-frontal cortex..." -- "How does the other shape the self? Well, we internalize their perspective." -- 'We treat our self like we have a self. We learn what we are like. We learn what we ought to be like. Self-knowledge is not gained from introspection.'

'The opposite of the hoarder isn’t the monk but the person who creates something new and unique with the things he consumes. Hoarding happens when someone is further up Maslow’s pyramid than they realize. At a lower economic level, access to physical materials is scarce. At a higher level, stuff is plentiful and the scarce quantity becomes time and energy. Many folks are mis-calibrated at this boundary: they spend scarce time and energy working to afford too many things which they then… lack the time and energy to enjoy in a fulfilling way. First you’re limited by stuff, then by money, then by time/energy. The free market economy does a great job at the bottom of the pyramid, but the higher you get the less help it can provide.'

'The technology has power because it addresses psychological vulnerabilities that many of us have. We want connection, but many of us fear the consequences of connection. True intimacy can be very scary. ...this is particularly true of the narcissists: "In a life of texting and messaging, those on that contact list can be made to appear almost on demand. You can take what you need and move on. And, if not gratified, you can try someone else.” This can set into motion a vicious cycle. As Sherry points out: "...if we ask, “What does simulation want?” we know what it wants. It wants – it demands – immersion. But immersed in simulation, it can be hard to remember all that lies beyond it or even to acknowledge that everything is not captured by it. For simulation not only demands but creates a self that prefers simulation. Simulation offers relationships simpler than real life can provide. We become accustomed to the reductions and betrayals that prepare us for life with the robotic.'

"...differences between acting out and working through. ...using these environments to explore and work through some aspect of the self... putting different aspects of yourself out there."

'Dr. Schwartz developed Internal Family Systems in response to clients descriptions of experiencing various parts—many extreme—within themselves. He noticed that when these parts felt safe and had their concerns addressed, they were less disruptive and would accede to the wise leadership of what Dr. Schwartz came to call the Self. In developing IFS, he recognized that, as in systemic family theory, parts take on characteristic roles that help define the inner world of the client. The coordinating Self, which embodies qualities of confidence, openness, and compassion, acts as a center around which the various parts constellate. Because IFS locates the source of healing within the client, the therapist is freed to focus on guiding the clients access to his or her true Self and supporting the client in harnessing its wisdom. This approach makes IFS a non-pathologizing, hopeful framework within which to practice psychotherapy.'

'...we are all "multiple personalities", organized by a "self" that is compassionate, curious, and expansive. These sub-personalities, or "parts", are all good and are with us from birth. They are kept in balance and harmony through self-leadership. When the self is threatened by trauma or devaluation from the outside world, the parts protect the self from harm; in doing so, they also lose trust in the self's ability to provide leadership and safety. In "exiling" the self for its own protection, these parts become extreme and polarized; the parts that were hurt carry the burdens of pain and suffering ("exiles") that other parts (i.e., "managers" and "firefighters") try to keep out of conscious awareness through various roles and operations. This becomes a recursive system which feeds upon itself to create symptoms when a person is under stress. ...the parts that have taken these extreme roles, when released from these roles, become non-extreme, valuable, and helpful to the person.'

'IFS sees consciousness as made up of various "parts" or subpersonalities, each with its own perspective, interests, memories, and viewpoint. A key understanding of IFS is that every part has a positive intent for the person and is trying to help the person or protect against pain, even if the actions/effects of that part cause dysfunction. This means that there is never any reason to fight with, coerce, or try to get rid of a part; it allows the IFS method to promote internal connection and harmony. Parts can have either “extreme roles” or healthy roles. IFS focuses on parts in extreme roles because they are in need of transformation through therapy. IFS sees the therapist's job as helping the client to disentangle themselves from their parts and access the Self, which can then connect with each part and heal it, so that the parts can let go of their destructive roles and enter into a harmonious collaboration, led by the Self.'

'The huge advantage of addressing human problems in the individual form is beyond comprehension. The most obvious boon of this altered way of coping with human suffering is the elimination of violence. It’s true even today that the extent to which people address their emotional experience internally, instead of inflicting it together, socially upon some issue or cause, measures the extent to which violence has already been partly defeated. Eventually we will realize that studying the self as an ecosystem, which contains both beneficial as well as contradictory parts, is the most important kind of education we will ever undertake or accomplish. This self-learning will no longer have the sting that “illness” attaches to it; thus it will no longer be called “psychotherapy”. Instead it will become the core of all education, funding every other kind of exploration with the wisdom of self-knowledge.'

'SuperMe is a web game which helps you to be better at life. It's about resilience: how to feel good when life chucks you lemons. How to be better at thinking positively. How to cope with, and learn to love, failure. By playing SuperMe you'll learn how to be more resilient in real life, and by playing every piece of content you'll score points. Points! Everyone wants those. There are 500 experience points to be collected in Wisdom, Ability, Influence and Connection. The more experience you collect the better you are, and the higher you'll level up.' -- What these 'games' really need is an exit achievement called, 'DONE NOW. THANKS FOR THE HELP, EVERYONE. I'M OFF!' where you delete the game along with your points, badges and public profile and take your skills/achievements into real life where there's no easy feedback or pats on the head. Maybe there already is such an achievement. Perhaps it couldn't ever be 'built-in'.

Comment: David: From the book "The Practice of Self-Responsibility" in Nathaniel Branden's book "The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem" -- 'Some years ago, in my group therapy room, we hung on the wall a number of sayings that I often found useful in the course of my work. A client made me a gift of several of these sayings done in needlepoint, each with its own frame. One of these was "It isn't what they think; it's what you know." Another was "No one is coming." One day a group member with a sense of humor challenged me about "No one is coming." "Nathaniel, it's not true," he said. "You came." "Correct," I admitted, "but I came to say that no one is coming."'

Study: 'This may be a real irony of role playing—people whose main practice is pretending to be someone else may be also engaging in opening up so much through this practice that they are driving the very self-disclosure that leads to true social bonds.' -- Koster: 'People tend to think that muds alter how people perceive one another. That gender and race and handicaps cease to matter. It is a noble vision, sure, one shared in general by these frontier netters. In truth, muds reveal the self in rather disturbing ways. We all construct ‘faces’ and masks to deal with others. Usually in interpersonal relationships, the masks can slip, they evolve and react, and they have body language and cues. On a mud, on the net, whatever—they cannot. And people see specifically this: what you choose to represent yourself as, and THAT is more revealing of your true nature than gender, race, age, or anything else.'

'in reply to @virtualista RE: Personal Brands. A #contextcollapse multiple public 'masks' problem. Some ppl deal with it by always wearing the same one.'

Thoreau's formulation of a fully developed life: Live deliberately; live in your own life; live with no sense of resignation. '... on all of those dimensions, I feel that we're taking away from ourselves the things that Thoreau thought were so essential to discovering an identity. We're not deliberate; we're bombarded. We have no stillness; we have resignation -- There is a wonderful Freudian formulation, which is that loneliness is failed solitude. In many ways, we are forgetting the intellectual and emotional value of solitude. You're not lonely in solitude. You're only lonely if you forget how to use solitude to replenish yourself and to learn. And you don't want a generation that experiences solitude as loneliness. And that is something to be concerned about, because if kids feel that they need to be connected in order to be themselves, that's quite unhealthy. They'll always feel lonely, because the connections that they're forming are not going to give them what they seek.'

'One of the most important films ever made.' -- The ways to the One are as many as the lives of men.

'... solitude is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. ...the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. ...we no longer believe in the solitary mind. Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden. To remember this, to hold oneself apart from society, is to begin to think one's way beyond it. -- The last thing to say about solitude is that it isn't very polite. Not for nothing does "gregarious" mean "part of the herd." Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.'

'Carles attempts an escape from postmodernity by announcing a retreat from his online persona. As with Carles's earlier attempts at retirement and "digital suicide", Carles expresses an ultimately unfulfilled intention of retiring from blogging to expose how such intentions are in danger of becoming mere fantasies. It is no accident that the intention is presented as a question in the title of the first post linked above. The digital self is no longer autonomous, if it ever was autonomous in the first place. Our intentions are now subject to real-time referenda in the digital agora formed by mandatory social networking. We can now only at best wish to remove ourselves from the digitization and social mediatization of our lives. We can only dream of not broadcasting the quotidian details of our lives...'

'Helps ppl understand that u r transcendent. U r not a fan of 1 band. U r a a fan of ‘good/relevant’ music.'

'In the entire history of man, no one has ever been brainwashed and realized, or believed, that he had been brainwashed. Those who have been brainwashed will usually passionately defend their manipulators, claiming they have simply been "shown the light". The sad truth is that a high percentage of people want to give away their power—they are true "believers". They look for answers, meaning, and enlightenment outside themselves. True believers are not intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but are those craving to be rid of unwanted self. They are followers, not because of a desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy their passion for self-renunciation! They are eternally incomplete and eternally insecure. Never underestimate the potential danger of these people. They can easily be molded into fanatics who will gladly work and die for their holy cause. It is a substitute for their lost faith in themselves and offers them a substitute for individual hope.'

'...digitalization makes the reproduction of the permanently insecure self more integral to the reproduction of consumerist social relations. The capacities and networks of the internet permit an archived self that becomes a subject's most important piece of property ... "reputational capital," the sum total of connections and actions produced within the social space online. This self subsists on postitive affirmation and metrics that establish the visiblity of its activities online. Being is transformed into "presence," which can be measured and ranked ...a self will need to be grounded in commercialized, corporatized discourse before we apprehend it ...narratives of subjectivity are even more impoverished by the restricted classifications of digital data possible within these platforms. The self we are compelled to produce online is smaller, with less potential for growth and less curiosity, the more we produce it and add to the archive that will dictate our future choices.'

'Web 2.0 platforms want to tell us what we want before we know we want it... Because these predictive systems aren't openly disclosed, we can't know if the ways in which they prescribe our identity are benign, in our best interests, or if they are producing subjects (and subjectivities) suitable for a system engineered to exploit them. -- "...there is no contradiction anymore between the marketing of user information and the subjective enrichment of users..." -- ...all transactions are deeply personalized and specific, and thus seem identity-validating. ...consumerism is now the inverse, hyperpersonal identity mongering, with the "unique identity" as the perpetual product being sold and resold to the same individual subject. Web 2.0 is letting us sell out before our authentic self even exists. Selling out becomes the prerequisite for having an authentic seeming self, validated by the predictive systems online and fixed in illusory flux of social networks.'

On predictive consumption: 'The field for our idenity production is beginning to be circumscribed by the data we ourselves generate -- we archive past iterations of ourselves and these hem us in for our own supposed good. The original choices that set us on a particular path recede into the domain of original sin. This is a digitization of the cliche about the butterfly effect. If only we hadn't bought that Adam and the Ants song on iTunes so long ago. I wouldn't be this person that I am now.' -- On meaning: 'The danger is that we outsource the meaning to these systems that do the thinking outside ourselves. That we trust the meanings supplied by the hive mind, by the search engine, by the wisdom of crowds and so on, because we end up demanding quantified versions of everything, along with a quantified data-driven sense of self, with immediate metrics to tewak and calibrate.'

'Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. He worked on his red book on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. -- “I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can—in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal—but then you need to do that—then you are freed from the power of them... Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book and turn over the pages and for you it will be your church—your cathedral—the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them—then you will lose your soul—for in that book is your soul.”'

'Online, the action is the tracing of trends and our own statistically determined significance. Twittering, and then seeing what sort of response it provokes, etc. We are never at a loss for an opportunity to try to garner attention, and these efforts are archived, deepening our potential self, even if it is all noise. The internet has given us means to sell ourselves the way products have long been sold to us, and we’ve embraced them, adopting advertising measuring tools as markers of moral value. ...we manage our public meaning like a brand manager, and perfect the art of culture monitoring—meta consumption of media. We begin to consume the buzz about buzz, or pure buzz, with no concern with what it’s about, only whether we can exploit it for self-promotion. ...nanostories, not suprisingly, preserve the status quo, reinforcing our own vanity and self-centeredness along with the market as timeless, unquestionable norm.'

'Online sharing is in the porcess of reaching its logical endpoint, in which identities become collective, and watching/consuming another's youtube presence becomes equivalent with becoming that presence. The technological miracle of transubstantiation takes place via hosts (IP hosts) that connect us up to the great cloud computers. Our displaced identities cannot be fixed in any particular place, disembodied we emanate and manifest in many servers at once; online we are legion. Naturally our boundaries dissolve -- we become what we regard on our screens, that with which we interact. -- The growth we once might have perceived in our pursuit of the authentic self has no conceptual or ideological basis in a post-internet society. -- Alt means not alternative but alternation. What Carles points the way toward is the oscillating self, or the dissolution of subjectivity into the online hive mind, in which every avatar is another mask we can wear.'

'Designy-ness, like so many consumerist products, lets us consume ourselves. ...designy-ness is an ideological sheen on consumerism, redeeming commodification while furthering it, permitting mass-distributed designy-ness to supplant genuine heterogeneity: the chance that we might really redeem the promise of individualism—that we will be able to garner social recognition for being ourselves, and recognition could be separated from being judged or taxonomized. But designy-ness and its off-the-shelf aesthetic (often prepared by lauded gurus) militates against that. However much we enjoy our own tastes in such stuff privately (solipsisticly) we become typecast when we exhibit those tastes publicly. ...we are isolated by our tastes and the goods whispering our ersatz uniqueness to us, and we gloat in our transcendence until the loneliness overwhelms us, and we are driven to participate in society, which we can do only on those same terms, at the level of our tastes in everyday goods...'

'...no matter how hard he tries to “move forward” in an act of will to redefine his identity, he can’t control the ways that others see and define him. -- Our actions affect our identity, yet identity is only effective insofar as it ties us to others, opening us up to social forces that no individual can fully master. In the end, Betty is right that even the most intimate performances of our life are done for the sake of an audience. Yet that doesn’t make them “only” performances; rather, it infinitely increases the stakes of the way we form and perform our identities. A meaningful identity comes not from forgetting all previous ties in an act of willful self-assertion but from respecting the ties identity creates, the demands for attention and care that it entails—or at least, if one can no longer live with those ties and demands, counting the costs of breaking with one’s identity and knowing that the damage can never be fully contained.'

'... individualism is collapsing under the weight of globalization, and the more flexible branded self—which is duplicatable while retaining an aura of unique particularity—has replaced the idea of a coherent unified self. Hence identity is a brand, and a brand is identity, in a perfect tautology for the times: "I am Carles is a lifestyle brand, created by Carles." Being is the same as branding. Creating the self as brand is synonymous with having the self, with inhabiting the self. -- A brand self is emptied out, eradicating the emotional problems brought on by depth psychology: "Do u feel alone? The IAMCARLES.com brand is attempting to be similar to the HIPSTERRUNOFF.com brand. It wants u 2 feel like it ‘gets’ u." Reduced to the superficial level of signals, we will all be easy to "get" the shared language of brands is potentially less heteroglossic than vernacular speech. -- "R U CARLES? I AM CARLES?" stresses the way brands resolve and unify individuals into a single concept.'

'Let them eat Facebook profiles. -- We won’t put a price tag on ourselves or our friends or our pleasures, but Facebook will happily do that behind our backs, in economic exchanges that don’t include us. ...we have become the stuff being exchanged, both in what we are and what we do online. ...no matter how much we might love attention, we can’t use it to meet our basic needs. Ultimately, we all have to participate in the cash economy. -- In order to reclaim the fruits of our labor and stop working on the digital plantation, we may be forced to become self-consciously mercenary about what heretofore we have been content to share out of a spirit of convivial sociality. We will need to start viewing our social behavior as our intellectual property, our various selves as proprietary content to which we retain the broadcasting rights and which we have no intention of licensing for reuse without our express written consent.' -- Awesome reveal of 'free'

'This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities. -- “They used to have blankies; now they have phones, which even have their own umbilical cord right to the charger,” said Liz Perle, a mother in San Francisco who laments the early-morning technology immersion of her two teenage children. “If their beds were far from the power outlets, they would probably sleep on the floor.”'

#5 Search for Authenticity: If you are smart, you realize that ‘authenticity’ is yet another archetypal persona that seduces you into a static self-conception. If not, you go down an obsolete path blazed by a stoned generation. #8 Skill: Some of your personas become increasingly comfortable to inhabit. You start noticing that you are now acting out the role so well that you are actually as good or better in those roles than people you previously considered “authentic” non-actors. This leads to the epiphany that everybody grows into roles this way. #11 Fluidity: Jumping among the set of point-like roles in the space of personas yields to continuous movement. You become aware of the gradual expansion of the space you can inhabit. It starts acquiring, through its growth, a shape and character. #12 Brandhood: The integrated, growing space which you can inhabit with fluidity starts acquiring an overall sum greater than the parts consistency, that has only one analogy: the notion of brand.'

On media ecology and Postman's amusing ourselves to death. Quoting Henry Canbry, 1926: "What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life ... and the prime cause is not vanity ... but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in mass civilization." -- That 'context collapse' makes people to want to discover an authentic self to perform authentically towards 'authentic causes' that reinforce the authenticity of the endlessly authenticating self? Dude needs to read some HRO.

'What is it about cyberspace that loosens the psychological barriers that block the release of these inner feelings and needs? Several factors are at play. For some people, one or two of them produces the lion's share of the disinhibition effect. In most cases, though, these factors interact with each other, supplement each other, resulting in a more complex, amplified effect: #You Don't Know Me (dissociative anonymity) #You Can't See Me (invisibility) #See You Later (asynchronicity) #It's All in My Head (solipsistic introjection) #It's Just a Game (dissociative imagination) #We're Equals (minimizing authority)

'Numbers are making their way into the smallest crevices of our lives. Quantitative analysis by its very nature seems remorseless and inhuman. Numbers may be useful for epidemiologists and insurance companies, school systems, the military, and sociology professors, but what have they to do with the fabric of our personal lives? ... two years ago, my fellow Wired writer Kevin Kelly and I noticed that many of our acquaintances were beginning to do this terrible thing to themselves, finding clever ways to extract streams of numbers from ordinary human activities. A new culture of personal data was taking shape.' -- Bunch of old men trying to cheat death by uploading their dataselves to the internets. Call this the Kurzweil-Kelly syndrome. By their numbers you shall know them.

'What's happened is you had an idea – which in a way was quite an heroic idea – that each individual could be themselves, could express themselves and become better people. In fact, what happened in that process is that you shifted the idea of risk away from institutions and onto the person themselves, and in that process is what people began to do – far from expressing themselves – began to monitor themselves to see whether they are the correct definition of the individual, whether it's in psychology, how they feel and how they behave; and they begin to search for – and are given – ways of monitoring that as individuals, and that paradoxically leads them to trying to become what they think is the right individual, which actually leads to homogeneity... that idea of total expressiveness... it may be breaking up now as we enter an economic crisis and politicians discover they have power, institutions have power, and that's the way to change the world. The idea of the self may change.'

On 'users’ criticism of a popular style of profile picture referred to as “MySpace Angles.” Reactions to this style of portraiture label the display of these photographs “deceptive,” alleging that MySpace Angles fool users into believing that the subject is more attractive than they actually are. ...the MySpace Angle commentary, revealing three main themes in users’ critique of MySpace Angles: 1) users who post these photographs are conforming to a social trend at the expense of their individuality; 2) the presentation of these photographs is narcissistic; and, 3) these photographs purposefully conceal the body. This case study displays a shift in the conception of deception online; on the social Web populated by SNSs, theories of deception and authenticity are called into question as users are increasingly anchored to their bodies and expected to effortlessly present an online self mirroring the offline self.' -- False advertising. Caveat emptor.

'I’m starting to think that Internet romances, including Mark Sanford’s, are not romances between people at all. They’re affairs with the Internet. Watch people who are newly in love, especially any kind of love that requires that the participants keep stealthy and apart, and they’re all over their iPhones and Palm Pres. It’s P.D.A. with P.D.A.’s. Romance seems to have become an online multiplayer fantasy-adventure game, no less thrilling than World of Warcraft, and open to all ages. Apparently you’re never too old to relish using special screen names to send cryptic messages on secret decoder devices.' -- 'The connection to communications technology — the connection to connection — has become part of what makes us human. In the idiom of those who are swooningly in love, it makes us “feel alive.” When we’re denied the connection to connection, it’s no wonder we lust for it.' -- Love, temes xXx

Adam Curtis: "What we have is a cacophony of individual narratives, everyone wants to be the author of their own lives, no one wants to be relegated to a part in a bigger story; everyone wants to give their opinion, no one wants to listen. It's enchanting, it's liberating, but ultimately it's disempowering because you need a collective, not individual, narrative to achieve change." -- 'Curtis argues that we are still enchanted by the possibilities of our personal narratives although they leave us isolated, disconnected, and at their worst, they are simply solipsistic performances desperate for an audience. But we are in a bizarre hiatus because the economic systems that sustained and amplified this model of individualism have collapsed. It was cheap credit and a housing boom that made possible the private pursuit of experience, self-expression and self-gratification as the content of a good life. As this disintegrates and youth unemployment soars, this good life will be a cruel myth.'

'"I always thought that if I kept searching and exploring, I'd discover who I truly was," said Speth from his Wrigleyville efficiency. "Well, I looked deep into the innermost recesses of my soul, I plumbed the depths of my subconscious, and you know what I found? An empty, windowless room the size of an aircraft hangar. From now on, if anybody needs me, I'll be sprawled out on this couch drinking black-cherry soda and watching Law & Order like everybody else." "Fuck it," he added.'

'People were randomly assigned to read Chekhov's story or the control piece. We measured their personality traits and their emotions before and after reading, and we found that those who read Chekhov's story changed more in their personality traits and emotions than those who read the non-fiction-style control version. The changes, moreover, were mediated by the emotions that readers experienced while reading. The changes of personality that we found were small, and they were all in different directions. So we think we can say that they were in each individual's own direction. Our view is that as one reads a piece of literary fiction—as one runs the simulation in one's mind—one is affected by it. People who read a lot of fiction may be able to use their fictional reading, in small ways, to imagine their selfhood into circumstances other than the usual, and thereby to extend their sense of themselves: in their own way.'

'The Narcissism of small differences is a term coined by Sigmund Freud in 1917, based on the earlier work of British anthropologist Ernest Crawley]. The term describes the manner in which our negative feelings are sometimes directed at people who resemble us, while we take pride from the "small differences" that distinguish us from them. The term appeared in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929-1930) in relation to the application of the inborn aggression in man in ethnic conflict. Glen O. Gabbard, M.D. suggested Freud's "Narcissism of Small Difference" provides a framework within which to understand that in a loving relationship there can be a need to find, and even exaggerate, differences in order to preserve a feeling of separateness and self.'

'I walk down the street and people stare at me. They wonder ‘what is up with that bro.’ They would never be able to understand what is up with me. “I” do not “exist.” I am just sort of here to ‘challenge’ people and their ‘realities.’ I make you uncomfortable because I do not exist for the same reason you exist. I am a conceptual bro. I want to make u ‘think’ about ‘the big picture.’ Want to make u ask ‘why?‘ I want to be noticed. I do not want to be noticed. I am a think piece.'

'What makes the creative-writing programs so suspect is... the intense egocentricity they seemed geared toward generating. ...the people of the creative class are fairly certain they are destined to be creative, but can never be certain about just how creative they are. So they must seek outward signs of their blessed inner superiority, must seek or contrive recognition for their creativity whenever possible. This is that class’s essential self-consciousness... Self-proclaimed creative writers are an elite group that teaches the rest of us and the generations that follow how to be minutely worried about the status of the self, the micromechanisms for conveying identity or computing that of the people we encounter. Creative-writing programs institute trickle-down narcissism. The “habit of self-observation” seems to me a most unfortunate curse, an inability to escape from oneself or see past oneself and become immersed in experiences, in dialogues, conversations.'

"Plastic surgery and procedures have increased fivefold in just 10 years; even invasive surgeries like breast augmentations quadrupled between 1997 and 2007. The square footage of U.S. homes nearly doubled in 30 years, and levels of debt rose from 16% of disposible income in 1978 to 19% in 2007. The circulation of celebrity gossip magazines has surged even as other types of magazines have faltered. High school students are markedly overconfident about their future educational and career prospects. These changes are so large and pervasive that they suggest the change in individual-level narcissism is a pale reflection of the much bigger sea change in the culture. As I document in Generation Me, parents began to tell children they could be anything they wanted to be. Popular songs declared that loving yourself was the greatest love of all. Schools began programs to raise children’s self-esteem. Pop psychology taught that you have to love yourself first before you can love someone else."

'..."without words for emotions". Typical deficiencies may include problems identifying, describing, and working with one's own feelings, often marked by a lack of understanding of the feelings of others; difficulty distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotional arousal; confusion of physical sensations often associated with emotions; few dreams or fantasies due to restricted imagination; and concrete, realistic, logical thinking, often to the exclusion of emotional responses to problems. In general, these individuals lack imagination, intuition, empathy, and drive-fulfillment fantasy, especially in relation to objects. Instead, they seem oriented toward things and even treat themselves as robots. ...the disaffected individual had at some point "experienced overwhelming emotion that threatened to attack their sense of integrity and identity," to which they applied psychological defenses to pulverize and eject all emotional representations from consciousness.'

'...the explosive interest in positive psychology is, like so many cultural curiosities involving self-obsession, a boomer phenomenon. ...the psychology of positivity and productivity were a perfect fit for the ethos of the bubble years. -- ...maximizers, in practically every study one can find, are far more miserable than people who are willing to make do (economists call these people satisficers). “My suspicion is that all this choice creates maximizers.” -- ...our beliefs that money and children will make us happy are super-replicators—without them, civilization wouldn’t survive. -- “Happiness is fine as a side effect. But I think it’s a cruel demand. It may even be a covert form of sadism. Everyone feels themselves prone to feelings and desires and thoughts that disturb them. And we’re being persuaded that by acts of choice, we can dispense with these thoughts. It’s a version of fundamentalism." ...happiness [is] “the most conformist of moral aims.”'

'Rubin held three sessions with his patient over the phone. “Please don’t abandon me!” Nordstrom said during the third session. “I’m staring at an empty couch. You are the one doing the abandoning. Are you abandoning yourself the way you have always been abandoned?” ....he [had] devised what Rubin termed “a self-cure." He sought to protect himself against the trauma of further abandonment by pre-emptively abandoning himself. If he wasn’t there in the first place, he wasn’t in a position to be cast away. The Zen concept of no-self was like a powerful form of immunity. ...he used Zen to assuage the pain of the past, hiding the pathological aspects of self-abandonment and neglect in the rapture of Zen vacancy; how he hid from his own neediness, anger and grief in the ecstatic abnegation of enlightenment. "One of the most important insights I got from therapy is that subconsciously I want the depth of my suffering to be witnessed by someone. ...I [had] embraced an aggrandized narrative."'

'Constant connection makes us chronically impatient. We come to expect everything to happen at the touch of a button – and get angry when it doesn't. As the actress Carrie Fisher once quipped, these days "even instant gratification takes too long." The other day, my neighbour, a multitasking marketing executive, lost her BlackBerry; or thought she did. It turned out that her five year old daughter had hidden it. "I thought it would get you to listen to me when I talk," explained the little girl. Overdosing on mobile communication can also mess up the relationship we have with ourselves. Human beings need moments of silence and solitude: to rest and recharge, to think deeply and creatively, to look inside and confront the big questions, 'Who am I? How do I fit into the world? What is the meaning of life?'. That isn't likely to happen when your mind is constantly wondering if you have new email or if it's time for a fresh tweet.' -- Interesting comment on fear of uncertainty (untether)

Sherry Turkle: '“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be. Texting hits directly at both those jobs.” Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind. “If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,” she added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”'

"On one level, people have understood the power and importance of silence for a long time. It's why we go to the woods, or the ocean, or up on mountainsides to renew ourselves. And why we take up meditation, or spend time in quiet cathedrals. But even the most majestic mountainside loses a large piece of its power to inspire if it has to compete with a cell phone, text reply, or other efforts to stay connected elsewhere at the same time. Or even to record the moment, instead of simply being in it. We also have an ingrained habit of constant connection that makes disconnecting more difficult. And potentially more painful. Where there's a will there's a way, of course. Which is what makes me suspect that at least part of the constant connectivity movement and technology stems from an inherent desire, within many of us, to have all that distraction. We are not, as a species, hard-wired for solitude. We're social animals, made to exist in tribes and packs. And yet ..."

"I have this sense that experiences need to be shared in a much more mediated way to register to myself as having happened. ...since online sharing has become a way of translating my own experiences to myself, without that process readily available to me, I felt dulled at times, alienated from myself to a degree. All of this is to say that I think that the internet has suddenly brought us a much denser experience of interpersonal relationships and sociality that forces us to reshape the way we think of ourselves, as being potentially social at basically all times. We are perpetually present everywhere, with a ubiquity wireless connectivity supplies. The result of this thick intimacy, this perpetual sociality, is that we may have much more difficulty achieving harmony with the natural world, where presence is momentary and fragile, and sociality is limited to the distance our voices can travel." -- Data or it didn't happen.

"In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from a convenient legal fiction to the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that theyre no longer even aware of it." -- Lamenting The Advertised Life

'"Just want to create an accurate version of ‘the world’ according 2 my internet experience," Carles remarks slyly, a nod toward the way online textuality has fashioned a densely layered world that is more real than real. But within the dense thicket of textuality, it is easy for us to lose ourselves, as Carles warns. "Do u believe that u can create ur own internet, and within that context, cultivate meaning + an appreciation of ‘the world’ according 2 u?" With a rigorous interrogation of online interactivity, we may instigate an inversion of the subject and object, so that the referentiality of truth may become obscure and ontology a kind of vacuum. A negative theology of the self as searchability ("Is google the ‘anti-christ’/God?"), with the real pouring out of virtual worlds rather than into them.'

'Robert Bornstein talks about "dual dependency": the desire to have portable technologies nearby all the time and the desire to have other people always reachable at a moment's notice. Several people told me that they felt naked without their cell phones on them at all times and that they sleep with their computers or cell phones in their beds with them! Many more keep the devices not too far away at night and feel uncomfortable and agitated when physically separated from them or when they must be turned off.' -- 'Kate Fox says that portable technologies help us restore the kind of continuous communication with our 'tribes' that was common in pre-industrial days. It is alienating to be physically separated from our friends and family, she argues. Cell phones reduce that alienation by restoring a kind of pre-modern sense of community in which people were in frequent, almost constant, contact. They return us, she says, to "the more natural and humane patterns of pre-industrial society."'

'“Poor folk love their cellphones!” [Bruce Sterling] said. “Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.' -- “I wish I didn’t have obligations,” someone posted not long ago. “I wish I had somewhere to go,” wrote an­other. “I wish things were different.” “I wish I grew up in the ’60s.” “I wish I didn’t feel the need to write pointless things here.” “I wish I could get out of this hellhole.”'

'“Hipsterism,” is more a fear of irrelevance or phoniness than it is an aesthetic one would purposely adopt. It is the shadow that passes over us when we begin to tentatively plan to do something unconventional, the chill that tells us that maybe it would be safer to do nothing rather than become one of them, trying for cool but failing. That is to say, “hipsterism” is the term for that sinking feeling that cool is at stake in any endeavor, and that nothing can be pursued for its own sake anymore. Of course that is not true, but it often feels like it is, and the image of a stereotype arriviste hipster is there to personify that feeling. And the final twist is that once we begin to fear becoming hipsters, begin thinking primarily about the way what we are doing will be perceived by others who somehow can see through us to the roots of our motivations, we become at that very moment hipsters ourselves.'

'Narcissism is just the user interface for nihilism, of course, and with artfully kitschy services like Twitter we're allowed to both indulge our self-absorption and distance ourselves from it by acknowledging, with a coy digital wink, its essential emptiness. I love me! Just kidding! The great paradox of "social networking" is that it uses narcissism as the glue for "community." Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. '

'These posts are about fatal strategies. Baudrillard advocated a sort of nihilistic indulgence in place of perpetual resistance, and Carles has decided to dabble in this sort of paradoxico-ironical epistemology. Chasing authenticity is the guarantee it will never be achieved. But as Baudrillard advocates, "We will not be looking for change, and will not oppose the fixed to the mobile; we will look for the more mobile than mobile: metamorphosis." The only escape from the strictures of identity and authenticity is to present an entire new identity; schizophrenia, as Deleuze and Guittari had suggested in Anti-Oedipus, becomes the inevitable response to the structural necessity of capitalism to fashion a lack in the midst of excess. ... when humans are reconceptualized as desiring machines and retro fitted with cloud-computing-derived extensibility and perpetuity? Is Jeff the first rain from that cloud? Are we all to expect to see Jeff in our mirrors, some unsuspecting morning?'

'Hipsters are the infiltrators who spoil the resistance—the coolhunting collaborators and spies. We all had a stake in defining “hipster” as “not me.” In always pushing ourselves to repudiate hipsterism, we may drive ourselves to new ways to conceive of our identity—but what good are these if these are always ripe for becoming the new modes of hipsterdom? What good is it to stay a few steps ahead if you always remain on the hipster path? How do we stop worrying about the degree to which our treasured self-conceptions can be made into cliches against our will? The problem with hipsters seems to me the way in which they reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how “cool” it is perceived to be. Everything becomes just another signifier of personal identity. Thus hipsterism forces on us a sense of the burden of identity, of constantly having to curate it if only to avoid seeming like a hipster.'

"Afraid. Afraid of losing everything. Afraid of my site ‘dying.’ Afraid of losing sight of ‘what’s important in life.’ Scared of who I am finding out I amIs the internet ‘my prison.’ Not sure if I have a healthy sense of self [via the internet]"

'It might not be long before memories are pharmaceutically targeted, just as moods are now. #Sandberg: People are more worried about deletion [than adding memories]. We have a preoccupation with amnesia, and are more fearful of losing something than adding falsehoods. The problem is that it's the falsehoods that really mess you up. If you don't know something, you can look it up, remedy your lack of information. But if you believe something falsely, that might make you act much more erroneously. You can imagine someone modifying their memories of war to make them look less cowardly and more brave. Now they'll think they're a brave person. At that point, you end up with the interesting question of whether, in a crisis situation, they would now be brave. We can't trust our memories. But on the other hand, our memories are the basis for most of our decisions. We take it as a given that we can trust them, which is problematic. We have authentic fake memories, in a sense.'

Really nice thoughts on 'multitude' identities, authenticity, plausible deniability (burying bad news/negative impressions about yourself online), and from a branding pov, the long-term value of the trust that comes from allowing an audience and employees to collaboratively break the 'fourth wall of business.'

'Ideas you can expect to see coming to the mainstream soon are such wonders as self-diagnosis kits and stress monitors. As we advance in understanding what is useful there will be more and more of these services emerging to aid the masses in acute self-awareness. Potentially scary but with great data, comes greater understanding (or at least that's the theory). The technology is already here.'

'Mental resilience relies in part on exactly this kind of autobiographical storytelling... The investigators found that the third-person scenes were significantly less upsetting, compared with bad memories recalled in the first person. “What our experiment showed is that this shift in perspective, having this distance from yourself, allows you to relive the experience and focus on why you’re feeling upset,” instead of being immersed in it.. The emotional content of the memory is still felt, he said, but its sting is blunted as the brain frames its meaning, as it builds the story. The way people replay and recast memories, day by day, deepens and reshapes their larger life story. ...new research is giving narrative psychologists something they did not have before: a coherent story to tell. Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become.'

'Who among us doesn't contain a few multitudes? ...the online world -- where we are spending an increasing amount of time -- is intolerant of our multiple personality disorder. This is one of the paradoxes of the Internet age: the freedom of the Internet is also constraining. The image we project of ourselves online -- what some academics call "unitary identity" -- becomes our defining image for all audiences. It does not allow us to shed a past identity or recreate ourselves, or to project different images to different audiences. -- The problem is that all these sites -- Facebook, MySpace and Twitter -- constrain us to sending one "signal" to many audiences. Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski has written about the need to send different signals at different times. What we need are better controls over which signals we are sending to our various online audiences... we want our multiple digital identities to more closely mirror our contradictory selves.'

"A modified Roomba tries to detect, and avoid, stressed-out users. ...a headband reads bioelectrical signals to a humble floor-cleaning Roomba. The headband, which is sold as a gaming device, detects muscle tension in the wearer's face, so the researchers were able to directly control the Roomba's speed by, for example, clenching their jaws or tensing their eyebrows. They also developed a somewhat crude way to evaluate a person's emotional state, based on facial muscle tension (the more tension, the more stress), and programmed the Roomba to respond. If a person exhibited high stress, the Roomba continued cleaning but moved away from the user... a robot designed to provide comfort could instinctively approach a person who is feeling particularly sad or stressed." -- And then the mind comes to depend upon the expressions of machine to know what it should be feeling.

On services that... 'attempt to transform everyday life tasks into games by assign values to them and keeping score. ...a world in which collective experience is systematically abrogated, a world in which only competition can “unite” us and corporations reap the profits from our combat. We end up sharing only the ideal of measured achievement: how many more points we can score, how many people are reading our updates, how many more things we can own or add to our list of experiences. Services [that] meet the need we now have to have our social experiences more rigidly structured by an outside party, a referee, some sort of mediator. We seem to have worked ourselves into a corner where we must outsource our ability to be motivated. We need outside parties to generate motivational schemes and point systems to drive us through life activities that were once rewarding enough in and of themselves. ...nullifying the quality of experience and reducing it to a point value.'

On Twitterification: 'We are expected to be, or become, “omnivorous consumers of momentary trivia.” Not only that, but we are expected to produce that trivia ceaselessly and eagerly. This calls to mind Foucault’s ideas about power exercising itself not as repression—that is, as forbidding us to speak or to act in certain ways—but as permission, as a kind of broad encouragement to speak (albeit through discourses that constitute our identities along certain prescribed lines). Our participation lets power work through us, which we can experience as being exciting—as being part of the action; we are all under surveillance, but we understand that emotionally as “Hey, we’re all celebrities!” Foucault calls it “control by stimulation.” This is why people seem to feel compelled to use Twitter. We want to participate, want to be counted, want to count. -- We are spying on each other and confessing ourselves to everybody else, and mistaking it all for entertainment consumption...'

'Users have tended to migrate from site to site as new services become more fashionable and old services become overpopulated with lame late adopters or worse, too many of those people who cause “contexts to collide”: As Boyd explains, “In choosing what to say when, we account for both the audience and the context more generally. Some behaviors are appropriate in one context but not another, in front of one audience but not others. Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it’s often difficult to figure out what’s appropriate, let alone what can be understood.” When your current friends get to see how you interact with people who knew you decades ago, or when parents can scrutinize profile pages looking for insight into their children’s social life apart from them, it can be problematic.' -- (That 'contexts collide' observation is worth repeating)

"The narcissist is described as turning inward for gratification rather than depending on others and as being excessively preoccupied with issues of personal adequacy, power and prestige. Narcissistic personality disorder is closely linked to self-centeredness. Though individuals with NPD are often ambitious and capable, the inability to tolerate setbacks, disagreements or criticism, along with lack of empathy, make it difficult for such individuals to work cooperatively with others or to maintain long-term professional achievements. With narcissistic personality disorder, the person's perceived fantastic grandiosity, often coupled with a hypomanic mood, is typically not commensurate with his or her real accomplishments. The exploitative, sense of entitlement, lack of empathy, disregard for others, and constant need for attention inherent in NPD adversely affect interpersonal relationships. -- #2 is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance... #7 lacks empathy"

"Your stats in a single glance. Ego gives you one central—and lovely—location to check web statistics that matter to you. ...you can quickly view the number of visits to your website (including daily, hourly and monthly numbers), feed subscription totals and changes, and how many people are following you on Twitter." -- Numbers numb

'My avatar has changed. For the past half year I’ve been writing under a stranger’s face - a “spare” avatar ... At first, I found it awkward to write and felt slightly irritated by being represented by a stranger. ... self-representation and avatar usage can be a serious matter online. The avatars we chose to represent ourselves have an impact on how we behave and also on how we’re perceived online. That’s why sites that easily allow you to change your avatar often are more engaging and interactive. People change their avatar to reflect their mood, send secret messages to other friends, display self- attributes, social role, a fantasy representation of who they want to be or they might just want to provoke. ...seeing people’s creative use of avatars make me much more interested in finding out what’s going on at a site and communicate with the people who use it."

'... college was my big chance to [...] reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self? Perhaps my nieces will find a new way to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation. Perhaps they will evolve through judicious deleting and updating of profile information, through the constant awareness of their public face. It could be that [...] Facebook marks a return to the time when people remained embedded in their communities for life, with connections that ran deep, peers who reined them in if they strayed too far from the norm... Kids [...] will inevitably want to drive a stake into the heart of former lives, may simply abandon [Facebook] and find something new: something still unformed, yet to be invented — much like themselves.'

"A young man struggles against the pressure to Twitter his life away." -- Tweet