on sockpuppets
Half my friendslist has met me, but I somehow doubt anyone would have suspected me of being a sockpuppet or fake persona anyway. What would be the point of inventing *me*? It'd be like the most obscure piece of fandom performance art ever.
I'm fascinated by the social psychology of fandom in all of its manifestations, from the heartwarming to the bizarre. I can't subscribe to fandom_wank, because if I did I would probably do nothing all day but chart the social dynamics of various scandals. Someone in the community has got to be writing an academic analysis of sockpuppetry and related scams, and if you know who it is, please tell me so I can go cheer her on. This is exactly the sort of phenomenon that got me interested in social psychology in the first place. I love the way that social psych takes the weird, the problematic, the counter-intuitive, and instead of sequestering them it pokes them and interrogates them until they end up saying something about normal human behavior: this is how we work, this is what we want, this is how we do the best we can with what we have.
(That being said, I'll bet that if anyone is writing about it, they're in Speech Communications or Sociology, maybe, not Psychology. Describing a phenomenon and putting it in theoretical & historical context isn't enough to get you into a top-tier psych journal, usually. There's got to be some new theory development and hypothesis testing. I get the impression that some of the related disciplines have more latitude on this issue -- but maybe not.)
I mean obviously, people have been lying about themselves ever since words were invented, but as far as I can figure, not until the advent of bulletin boards and Usenet were there communities of such social intricacy and emotional intensity that also allowed for so much anonymity (were there similar scandals in the days of 'zines?), and as the online social landscape becomes more complex, the array of social benefits obtainable grows, and the strategies for false presentation get positively byzantine.
It's just really cool.
I'm fascinated by the social psychology of fandom in all of its manifestations, from the heartwarming to the bizarre. I can't subscribe to fandom_wank, because if I did I would probably do nothing all day but chart the social dynamics of various scandals. Someone in the community has got to be writing an academic analysis of sockpuppetry and related scams, and if you know who it is, please tell me so I can go cheer her on. This is exactly the sort of phenomenon that got me interested in social psychology in the first place. I love the way that social psych takes the weird, the problematic, the counter-intuitive, and instead of sequestering them it pokes them and interrogates them until they end up saying something about normal human behavior: this is how we work, this is what we want, this is how we do the best we can with what we have.
(That being said, I'll bet that if anyone is writing about it, they're in Speech Communications or Sociology, maybe, not Psychology. Describing a phenomenon and putting it in theoretical & historical context isn't enough to get you into a top-tier psych journal, usually. There's got to be some new theory development and hypothesis testing. I get the impression that some of the related disciplines have more latitude on this issue -- but maybe not.)
I mean obviously, people have been lying about themselves ever since words were invented, but as far as I can figure, not until the advent of bulletin boards and Usenet were there communities of such social intricacy and emotional intensity that also allowed for so much anonymity (were there similar scandals in the days of 'zines?), and as the online social landscape becomes more complex, the array of social benefits obtainable grows, and the strategies for false presentation get positively byzantine.
It's just really cool.