Fauxtrovert

It took me a long time to overcome my distaste of blogs. I'm still not a huge fan but writing peripatetic axiom does seem to be better than useless. After a certain amount of prodding I've started to dabble with twitter.

I'm not finding it easy. One problem is that a lot of the time I'm doing things that I'm not supposed to tell anyone else about (because they are commercially sensitive) and a lot of the rest of the time I'm doing things that I just can't believe anyone would be interested to know about. That second part would seem to be a part of the introvert type.

As with blogs in the early days ("I like beer", "isn't my cat cute" etc.) the art of twittering all the miscellaneous stuff of ones' life seem fairly pointless in a way I've found difficult to explain. But now redditor shenpen has expressed it very well for me. The twitter stance would appear often to be not introversion, and not extroversion, but fauxtroversion

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I disagree. Perhaps it's because I'm aware that my public-speaking persona is substantially different than my in-person persona, but I don't believe in context-independent personality. The medium (twitter) allows a kind of extroversion that I don't do in person, but that doesn't mean it's fake.

On the other hand, my tweeting isn't particularly phatic.

keithb said...

Interesting. I do think that I have a context-independent personality, and at the same time different aspects of that personality express themselves differently in different context. Perhaps we agree?

Twitter (and email and wiki and...) strike me as being like masks. I've done enough acting in front of paying audiences to know that masks give you permission to do things that you always could but never would. So, in once sense I'm that, for example, the extroversion that you feel you exhibit on twitter is genuine.

At the same time, I'm not convinced that all the extroversion exhibited by everyone all the time is authentic. I think I know that some of mine isn't.