Synogenes.com

The growth of Bebo, MySpace, and the other personality projection sites is an expression of the growing need for people to design their presence, to choose those aspects of their personality they want others to see. On these sites we can actually control to a high degree the initial impressions made on others by designing the interface. We can expose as much or as little detail as we like, stress those aspects we want others to focus on. We can refocus the image of us as much as we like and as many times. If the response is not what we want, we adjust the image and fine tune it.

This is very different from the real world where impressions last, and relationships are based on person to person contact with the recipient free to take in as much or as little of the rich matrix of perceptions available to them. There is a very narrow information bandwidth available on these sites, essentially some photos and a self-selected set of characteristics; none of the facial expressions, psychological reactions, quick or slow reactions.

What effect does that have? Well, it makes it entertaining to start with. The harmless manipulation of other people's reactions to us, drip-feeding just enough information to give them the desired impression, can be entertaining in itself. Of course, although we are manipulating the reactions, we are not immune from them so whilst we can engineer positive responses on demand by playing to strengths and weaknesses of our audience, we can't determine the audience itself - we assume that we will attract the right attention.

Some of course have a more commercial need to project an image. Musicians for example need to put not just their music into the marketplace but also their personality, image, world-view, biographical snips, hooks and tags to connect with their market, including mailing lists, blogs, podcasts, downloads, etc.

There is a curious overlap beginning to take place in which individuals who are essentially using the sites for entertainment, are consciously or unconsciously branding themselves by designing a personality. Whether they can or should live up to it in the real world is almost beside the point because they benefit from the entertainment value and it could be an alter ego in which they test out what kind of personality they'd like to have. That's part of the attraction for adolescents and teenagers and may provide a useful outlet for the emotional pressure that would otherwise be focussed on the hapless parents and relatives.

There may well be beneficial social effects too. It's now very easy to find and communicate with people of similar interests all over the world. You don't get the face-to-face (unless you use Skype...) and you don't generally get the longer term relationship, and you don't get an immediate response, but you do get people, mostly real people on the other end, even if they may not be who they say they are.

Negative sides? There are tales of the unfortunate teenagers who, without many friends in the real world, construct an image and profile for themselves in the virtual world and hope to attract lots of "friends". Unfortunately, not going out and inviting links with others, they remain not just isolated in the real world, but advertise their isolation to the global webspace - only 4 friends in the whole world, how sad? Perhaps a good way to exacerbate depression?

The subtleties of a pre-designed interaction using an avatar (even if it's only a partial one) create a very different psychological experience from the real world, but one which has an impact on the real psychology of the individual. They may become more adept at manipulating other people's perceptions of them but they may also become very much more aware of the subtleties of human interactions both skeptical and trusting. That kind of judgement is typically hard won in the world of knocks and scrapes. It might actually produce more adaptive and psychologically competent individuals rather than the distopian predictions of some of the technophobe pundits.

You can almost hear the clamour for research grants...

There are already many sources of studying this "new" field Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) including the following:

The inevitable Wikipedia entry

fascinating OU study of CMC and psychology.