carolstimmel.net

PoeTweets are poems delivered by nano-blogging in spurts across the 140-character per Tweet Twitter system.

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In social and dramatic circles, reflexivity describes an act of self-reference wherein an act of examination itself affects the antecedent.  Robert Merton described this as “Self-Fulling Prophecy”: once a prediction is made, people will behave in a manner that ultimately causes the statement to be true.  Think of it this way, an artwork itself means nothing without the audience itself.

And in the online world, we are the subject and object of our very own discourse. We create and affect our creations both explicitly and then consume them in every-varying contexts.  In almost every scenario where we are actively engaged in our persona management, facebook, myspace or linkedin, we create our own stage of persona which informs us about ourselves.  Furthermore, our persona is in turn affected by its examination by and intermingling with other members of the network itself.

Your online persona goes a long way to defining you in the first world. Seventy-seven percent of recruiters say the have checked a candidate online, according to the Boston Globe. Thirty-five percent have eliminated a candidate based on what they found. Managing your online reputation is unavoidable in 2008; many companies already do this with the use of such tools like Collective Intellect’s Media Intellect, in Real-Time. Individual user’s also need some way to obtain intelligence about their online persona that goes beyond googling an individual name.  Your name is your brand and it should be treated with as much care as Coca-Cola treats their brand.As an expert witness in a copyright theft case, my brand was googled and a paper I had written while working in a Research and Development environment was produced by the Defendant.  The context that I wrote that paper in was completely lost and I spent over an hour fielding questions about what I meant in that paper and how it impacted my thinking almost 10 years later.  A total Red Herring in this case on the part of the Defendant, but a great example that shows how with deep indexing of sites and their content, we are beholden to the first 2 pages of a search on our name.  What happens when employers, colleges and others start digging deeper into Social Networks and other niche sites looking at you.  Oh right, that already happens.Social Network aggregators can go the distance in helping you see what your current activity stream looks like to other’s in a near real-time perspective, but for now it doesn’t let you do much with the data, dig historically into the data or manage it.  The horizon of new social media requires this ability.