Offline Reality Online

Written on May 27, 2008 – 9:06 pm | by Shana Albert |

Social Desire will be featuring Guest Posts for the next few weeks. Today’s Featured Guest Post is by Peter Newsome of SiteMost.

Image by Lady-bug

Offline Reality Online

When I catch-up with friends we’ll usually talk about the highlights of our week, we’ll have a whinge about the things that got under our skin and we will vocalise our opinions some of the current events that we feel strongly about.

Take away the face-to-face interaction, convert the speech to text (although not in every case thanks to how easy it is to create and share audio and video content) and you have a blog.

When I get home from work, I’ll look through the cupboards and fridge and work-out what I’m going to make for dinner. Once I’ve made a decision, I’ll usually vocalise this to myself - “Tonight I’m going to make spaghetti bolognese!” (yes, I know that talking to yourself is the first sign of insanity and a lot of my friends already think I am a little insane).

I’ll also continue talking to myself as I prepare the meal “a little bit of oregano, a dash of wine…” and as the TV is usually on in the other room, I’ll often make comments about the day’s stories “Interest rates are up again, there’s still conflict in the Middle East and Britney Spears did what?!?”

The above examples of small conversations that we have with ourselves everyday could easily be seen by having a quick skim through Twitter logs.

When you’re at school, the more friends you have, the ‘cooler’ you are – aka MySpace, Facebook etc. etc.

Take away the cheesy voice-over and Benny Hill music from ‘Funniest Home Videos’ and I’ve just described at least a third of YouTube’s content.

My mother sticks little yellow Post-It notes on the side of her computer monitor listing websites she’s found and wants to remember how to get back to them – if she understood what I was talking about when I tried to teach her about del.icio.us

For your daily dose of tabloid news in an online format you don’t need to look much further than Digg. And just like you’ll need Amy Winehouse throwing-up on your shoes if you want your pic in the tabloids, you’ll also need some Social Media Celebrity Endorsement if you want your articles to appear on the front-page of Digg.

So as you can see, most online social media has been inspired by something offline (even if the inspiration was far from the examples above, you still get the general idea). The only problem is that there is still a very big disconnect between the real and the virtual worlds.

It’s like comparing reality TV with actual reality. I don’t know who’s reality it is, but I can’t recall the last time someone locked me in a house with a bunch of strangers and recorded my every move whilst making me perform challenges like eating worms or pouring spiders on my head, or watched me painfully sing karaoke, or become a model, or survive on a desert island or made me lose half my body weight etc. etc.

Sure, it might be entertaining, but it certainly isn’t what happens to you and I on a daily basis.

I’ve met bloggers that write well, seem quite entertaining and have hundreds of subscribers but in person they are very shy and introverted or waaaay over the top and are incredibly annoying to have a conversation with.

Whereas other bloggers that only have a handful of regular readers have been charming, interesting and insightful when I’ve met them face-to-face.

There was a guy I went to school with who still lives with his parents, works for the local government in an accounting role, hasn’t changed one little bit from the weedy, nerdy, annoying guy from senior school… but his Facebook page says he has 300+ friends.

Now I’m not trying to say that one’s online persona is inversely proportional to how popular they are offline… there are some really great people that I’ve met who are very popular both online and offline.

Although I think that we should observe how the online world has taken most of its inspiration from the real world and as it continues to do this, there will become a requirement for social media mavens to genuinely be as interesting and insightful in reality as they are online. Otherwise they may find that the virtual reputation they’ve worked so hard to build won’t hold-up as the two worlds (offline and online) become one.

If you enjoyed this Guest Post you can check out more of Peter’s work at SiteMost. And, while you are at it subscribe to the SiteMost Feed.

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One Response to “Offline Reality Online”
By Gab Goldenberg on May 29, 2008 | Reply

So maybe I should show declining subscription counts, cuz that’ll reflect positively on me as a human… hehe, clever reverse psychology! muahaha