The Butt Ugly Weblog

I heard a good word: Impression Management Strategy. Yup. It's not only for corporations anymore. What you thought to be your "style", or "thing" is actually just the way you have built your Impression Management Strategy.

My Impression Management Strategy is mostly this weblog. Every single aspect of it has been carefully designed, measured, balanced, and subjected to test groups, starting from the URL of the site. Every day, my underlings watch how a reader comes to the website, how long he spends there, and where he goes after that. All of my readers have been painstakingly profiled, analyzed, and categorized, so that I can offer just the right content for You(tm).

Not.

Yet.

Tools like Technorati, blogstreet, LinkedIn, BlogShares, and even your friendly neighbourhood web server log file analyzer give us a chance to dig deeper into the social networks that our blogs create. They are in the frontline of our Impression Management. And I believe they will have a strong role to play in our future. Not perhaps the current tools: so far they are merely toys, good keeping us amused for a short while, and playing grounds for testing new concepts.

But eventually, our social life will be technology-bound. It has already distanced itself from location (While walking on the street, I talk regularly to people I see rarely in real life: like relatives who live far away) thanks to the Internet and cell phones. There are people whom I have never met, but through my blog know intimate things about my life. Air travel allows you to meet friends that live far across the globe, and bashing bad American TV shows is an universal pastime.

The question is, how far can we go? Can we leave our impression management to computers who through profiling know exactly what the other person wants to see or hear? How about a video phone that changes your appearance and sound level to be more pleasing to the caller? How about a computer that sits on your shoulder, identifies the person who you are talking with and whispers in your ear so that you can say Just The Right Words? Cyrano de Bergerac would be envious...

We already filter out things from our weblogs, modify the truth so that it is more pleasing, or more jarring, but in general tuned more to conform to the view of the reality that we hold ourselves. There's not a big step left to take anymore.

Transparent Society, here we come.

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