Online/Offline Persona Experiment
Inspired by a recent discussion about blogging, pseudonyms, morality and questions of persona, I decided to use The Johari Window to test just how differently people perceive my online and offline personæ.
In her post at Arbitrary Marks, On Blogging Pseudoanonymously, Colleen's primary concern seems to be one of academic honesty. She asks: "If you don’t want your name attached to it, I have to wonder why not?" It's a good and valid question.
Initially, I did create a nom de blog for the purpose of keeping my spiritual pursuit of witchcraft within the context of academic exploration. I wanted to share my experiences and ideas with an interested and sympathetic audience, but I wasn't quite ready to announce to the world that I was a witch. Yes, writing behind a pseudonym afforded me the anonymity I wanted at the time. Although I've recently begun the effort to merge my online and offline identities, I'm not entirely out of the broom closet and, for now, I'm happy to keep my blogging persona somewhat removed from my real-life identity.
What compelled me to undertake this experiment was the question of whether online secret identities do affect our real personalities. Does blogging under a pseudonym, which allows us truly to be whomever we want within the context of the online world, lead to an inevitable infiltration of our own perception of self? And furthermore, how closely does an online persona compare to a real-life, or offline, one? Do I behave differently behind the keyboard than I do in person? How much influence does one persona have on the other?
The Johari Window asks you to choose five or six words from a list of adjectives that you feel best describe your personality. Then, you ask others to choose the five or six words they believe describe you. The results reveal the areas of overlap as the "Arena," the area where others see you differently than you see yourself as the "Blind Spot," and the area where you perceive yourself distinctly differently as the "Façade."
I performed this exercise twice. Each time I chose the same six words to describe myself. In the first exercise, I posted a link on my blog, asking those who know me only through their online experience of me as a blogger to indicate how they perceive me. In the second exercise, I emailed a separate link with the same request to a number of people who know me in person. This yielded two sets of results. I was then able to compare the "Arena" and "Blind Spot" results for my online and offline personæ.
One limitation of using The Johari Window for this kind of comparison is that many of the adjectives pertain to qualities difficult to convey in the context of a blog unless you are writing consistently about personal experiences and feelings for others. For example - patient. I've seen blogs written by new mothers about their experiences raising a child for the first time. Describing the challenges of motherhood would certainly reveal a great deal of patience on the part of the blogger. I write about witchcraft and spirituality. With the exception of a couple of mentions of candles that refused to light during a ritual, I doubt that much of what I write would convey a sense of patience!
The two things I found most intriguing and revealing about the results of the experiment are how much overlap there is in the perception of my two personæ and that the areas where my online persona is different from my offline persona represent qualities I might do well to work on in my daily life.
It would seem that I am writing in a voice that fairly closely mirrors that of my real-life personality. Many of the words that were chosen by those who know me in person were also chosen by those who only know me online (the list of both sets of words are available in the data provided below). In particular, the "Arena" was similar in both exercises. I identified myself as extroverted, intelligent, searching, caring, giving, and idealistic. Both sets of respondents also chose extroverted, intelligent and searching. It was only in the "Arena" from my real-life exercise that people also included caring and giving; this isn't unsurprising in light of the accepted limitations inherent in the selection of adjectives as discussed above. How would someone who doesn't know me in real life experience those aspects of my personality? Certainly, even if it occurred to someone reading my blog that I might possess those qualities, they wouldn't be the most obvious among the possible choices.
One conclusion I drew from the results of this experiment is that my online persona isn't influencing my offline persona enough! Within the safety of my pseudoanonymous blogger identity, I have explored and expressed an increasingly strong spiritual self. Among the words exclusively chosen to describe my online persona were: accepting, powerful, religious and wise. Maybe I should let more people in my real life see the spiritual side of myself that my blog persona projects. Perhaps it's time to come out of the broom closet after all!
Following are the data collected from the two exercises:
My Online Persona:
| Arena (known to self and others) extroverted, intelligent, searching | Blind Spot (known only to others) accepting, bold, confident, friendly, independent, knowledgeable, logical, observant, organised, powerful, reflective, religious, spontaneous, trustworthy, warm, wise |
| Façade (known only to self) caring, giving, idealistic | Unknown (known to nobody) able, adaptable, brave, calm, cheerful, clever, complex, dependable, dignified, energetic, happy, helpful, ingenious, introverted, kind, loving, mature, modest, nervous, patient, proud, quiet, relaxed, responsive, self-assertive, self-conscious, sensible, sentimental, shy, silly, sympathetic, tense, witty |
Dominant Traits
66% of people think that Angela-Eloise is knowledgeable
66% of people think that Angela-Eloise is religious
66% of people think that Angela-Eloise is wise
able (0%) accepting (16%) adaptable (0%) bold (16%) brave (0%) calm (0%) caring (0%) cheerful (0%) clever (0%) complex (0%) confident (50%) dependable (0%) dignified (0%) energetic (0%) extroverted (16%) friendly (33%) giving (0%) happy (0%) helpful (0%) idealistic (0%) independent (16%) ingenious (0%) intelligent (33%) introverted (0%) kind (0%) knowledgeable (66%) logical (16%) loving (0%) mature (0%) modest (0%) nervous (0%) observant (33%) organised (16%) patient (0%) powerful (16%) proud (0%) quiet (0%) reflective (16%) relaxed (0%) religious (66%) responsive (0%) searching (16%) self-assertive (0%) self-conscious (0%) sensible (0%) sentimental (0%) shy (0%) silly (0%) spontaneous (16%) sympathetic (0%) tense (0%) trustworthy (16%) warm (16%) wise (66%) witty (0%)
My Offline Persona:
| Arena (known to self and others) caring, extroverted, giving, intelligent, searching | Blind Spot (known only to others) able, adaptable, bold, brave, cheerful, clever, complex, confident, dependable, energetic, friendly, independent, kind, knowledgeable, loving, observant, organised, patient, proud, reflective, self-assertive, spontaneous, sympathetic, trustworthy, warm, witty |
| Façade (known only to self) idealistic | Unknown (known to nobody) accepting, calm, dignified, happy, helpful, ingenious, introverted, logical, mature, modest, nervous, powerful, quiet, relaxed, religious, responsive, self-conscious, sensible, sentimental, shy, silly, tense, wise |
Dominant Traits
60% of people agree that [my real name] is intelligent
able (10%) accepting (0%) adaptable (20%) bold (10%) brave (10%) calm (0%) caring (20%) cheerful (10%) clever (20%) complex (10%) confident (10%) dependable (20%) dignified (0%) energetic (10%) extroverted (40%) friendly (40%) giving (10%) happy (0%) helpful (0%) idealistic (0%) independent (20%) ingenious (0%) intelligent (60%) introverted (0%) kind (20%) knowledgeable (10%) logical (0%) loving (10%) mature (0%) modest (0%) nervous (0%) observant (10%) organised (30%) patient (10%) powerful (0%) proud (10%) quiet (0%) reflective (20%) relaxed (0%) religious (0%) responsive (0%) searching (30%) self-assertive (10%) self-conscious (0%) sensible (0%) sentimental (0%) shy (0%) silly (0%) spontaneous (10%) sympathetic (10%) tense (0%) trustworthy (30%) warm (20%) wise (0%) witty (20%)
Posted by Angela-Eloise at 9:02 PM