Focus on Self
Tinkering with a personal home page can be very absorbing and time consuming. It can also promote an increased focus on the self and a heightened, and perhaps exaggerated, sense that others are watching us with interest. I am reminded of the work of developmental psychologist David Elkind, who studied the characteristics of egocentrism in adolescence.
Young people can be rather absorbed in their self-images and mistakenly assume others join them in that absorption. Elkind found that one feature of this egocentrism is a preoccupation with the imaginary audience. During this stage in life, many people seem to overestimate how much others are watching and evaluating, so they feel unduly self-conscious about the impression they are making.
When we create a personal home page, we do not know much about the people who look at it or how much time they spend on it. Software tools can provide tracking information, such as statistics on the number of hits, graphs showing peak usage times, or the Internet addresses of the computers your visitors use. Although Web marketers wisely pour over these reports, not many homesteaders use them. Even when they do include a simple hit counter, the creator may underestimate the number of hits she herself contributed, or forget to subtract them from the total.
Outside of these personal home pages, it is often nearly impossible to decipher how many people attend to anything we post on the net. But the mere fact that millions of people could be scrutinizing our creations may inflate our perceptions of the audience's size. The same principle applies to online discussion forums, such as newsgroups and mailing lists. On a mailing list, for example, any post sent to the list name will land in the email inboxes of everyone who subscribed, and you can tell how many people are subscribed by querying the listserver. However, you have no idea how many people on the list are deleting your post as fast as a piece of unsolicited commercial spam. Some may be deleting entire discussion threads, or just using the delete key liberally to remove excess, low priority mail.
Another common destiny for posts sent to mailing lists is the automated filer. Most email software has a means for the recipient to file mail automatically into local folders based on various criteria, such as a string of text contained in the subject line or sender email address. For example, if I subscribe to a mailing list called GARDEN, I can use the filtering function in my email software to file any mail posted to that mailing list before I even see it. This reduces clutter in the inbox and also saves time, but any message filed this way could easily be treated the same way we treat those flyers and pamphlets we toss into a corner pile. That is where everyone drops incoming mail that seems too important to toss out right away, but not important enough to open immediately. We intend to look at those automatically filed list messages when we get the chance, but often, that chance never comes. Those messages, even the whole folder, could find their way into the recycle bin when the recipient finally decides it's time to free up some disk space, just as we toss those old magazines and pamphlets out when the pile gets too high and we think that corner could use a houseplant instead.
The characteristics of the Internet, then, may be encouraging us to spend unnecessary time polishing our online persona for an imaginary audience, one whose size might be in the millions, or might be close to zero. People who subscribe to a mailing list but never post anything are called lurkers, a name that reinforces the illusion that there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people out there sitting in the audience with their eyes glued to the stage, following the action intently. Another name for many of them might simply be deleters. When we see our own words and Web site on the Internet, a medium that reaches every corner of the globe, we may be too hasty to conclude that our audience is large and that they are hanging on our every word.
A difference between the imaginary audience effects we see in adolescents, and the ones that may be flourishing because of the Internet's unlimited shelf space and indeterminate audience size, is that we have far more control over our self-presentation on the Internet compared to what we had in high school. Even with very limited technical ability, we can tinker with digitized photos and completely bypass any concern about facial blemishes. We decide exactly what to say and how to say it, and which personality traits we want to feature.
