Who am I on the Internet?

Well, I think you know where the idea of dot really comes from. I appreciate Carl Sagan for his beautiful words.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

We do not stay the same

A few years ago, I started chatting with a friend on Facebook. After almost 4 months of online chit chat, we finally saw each other in real life. We kept talking and enjoying being with each other. But, at a point, that friend suddenly asked me why I was not as talkative and open as I had been before.  “Does he think that I pretended to be friendly (and cute)?” – I thought. Actually, it wasn’t the first time I had that trouble.

I am an introvert – a kind of person that is not many people’s cup of tea. I imagine that there’s a secret club of introverted people. Why secret? Because introverted people don’t come close to each other and say out loud: “Hey, I’m an introvert”. We secretly recognise each other, or not – because many introverted members of the club are experts of hiding their introverted nature inside. That’s where the trouble comes from.

Again – I am an introvert. FYI, that doesn’t mean I lack the capability to communicate with others. However, it’s not easy for me to start a conversation in person. The online world is my ally that makes me invisible, yet lively and “visible” at the same time. In Vietnamese, we have a phrase to talk about someone who rarely speaks up in public but is extremely active in front of the screen, even giving aggressive comments on social media. “Keyboard hero” has a negative meaning, but it also points out how the online world becomes a safe place for many people to express another part of themselves. In my case, luckily, that another part is not a truly “keyboard hero” but simply someone more confident whose conversations are full of emojis, stickers and WOW. That means my online self is still me, it’s just another part of the whole me. The friendly (and cute) girl on Facebook and the shy girl of 4 months later are the same.

I wanted to tell my friend that to know a person is like to peel an onion because it takes time and, sometimes, tears. That annoying round white vegetable is a fan of layered clothing – just like how each person would carry many layers of identity masks. The more masks you can take off, the more you understand that person. (And the more you peel an onion, the harder you cry.)

The media have changed, so have us

Do you remember this scene from The Matrix?

Neo was told that each pill would lead to a totally different life. Well, here’s the right version.

The same thing happens to you once you join the Internet. At that place, although you choose either the blue pill or the red pill, you have to learn how to fit your identity in the Internet framework. How can you stay the same when Twitter gives you only 280 characters (the limit used to be 140 characters, which is said to be more elegant) to render all your complicated and abstract thoughts into text? In case you have too much to let the world know, you need to be as active as President Donald Trump.  

What if you are on Instagram? That platform gives you no more than 24 hours to publicly give a secret hint to your crush on the story. If your crush continuously skips your story for more than a day, you lose your chance.

In short, you have to make yourself fit in the space that you receive from social media. It’s frustrating, but come on, you don’t pay any money for them. Everything they take from you is just your data. What else can you expect?

IoC = Internet of Changes

Human beings express themselves in communication so the change of the mediums transforms our lives in many ways. We used to talk to each other directly until we invented letters. Telephones and televisions have enlarged the distance of communication. Since the Internet sneaked in our lives through computers and mobile phones, the ability of communication has become unlimited. The mediums have changed, so have we. I am living in London while my parents are in Vietnam. At 1 am in London, when I am still partying with my friends, my parents start a new day at 8 am in Vietnam. A flight back to my country takes me about 17 hours. Luckily, Facebook is keeping us from falling apart. Every weekend, I enter Messenger, click the phone icon to call my mother. It’s just that easy.

But, wait, does that mean the Internet is bringing us closer? Let’s look back at our life about 30 years ago. I was born in 1991, five years after the economic reform of Vietnam. I was a kid living in a poor country, and the television was one of the most valuable items in the house. Most family couldn’t afford more than one TV. In low-income residential areas, the family owning a TV was the place that their neighbours hung out to watch the news every evening.

This meme is made from a programme on the channel VTV1 of Vietnam National Television

People used to put their only television in the living room, and many families’ timetable followed the schedule of TV programmes. At 7 pm, my parents, my brother and I gathered together, having dinner and watching TV. Two hours later, my parents fought over the remote because my mother hated all sport matches and my father didn’t want to cry for the miserable life of my mother’s favourite soap opera character.  

My family used to follow that strict schedule until self cell phones came and changed our life. During the TV era in the family, each member knew the entertainment taste of the others: dad loved football, mum was into romantic movies, I wanted but wasn’t allowed to watch teenage TV shows because of some American romantic love scenes in there. But things started changing when mobile phones replaced the protagonist role of the television. Tiny little phones contain more than what any television has, and they divide my family into private pieces. Now what each person does on his/her own phone is none of the others’ business. My cell phone is my *“black box” that saves my personal life from people’s curious eyes. I don’t share my phone’s password, I definitely don’t share my messages. Just for sure, I don’t let my mother follow me on Instagram because my Instagram life should stay as a secret to her. Another side of me lives in my cell phone, which I keep close to me even when I am sleeping.

* About that “black box” idea, please search for the movie Perfect Strangers – the most remade movie in the history of cinema.

The Internet gives me several stages where I can perform the other parts of me. Facebook was the first social network I joined. The platform, from my point of view, is like hotpot – a pan of everything. On Facebook, you can “feeling amazing”, react to friends’ posts, comment to show off your sense of humour, sell clothes, buy goods and date. What else can’t you do there? Facebook’s information overload decreases the attention you get if you are not a famous account with the blue verification mark. That explains why I rarely talk to strangers in real life but I can comfortably sing to everybody on Facebook.

The medium is the message.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

Televisions, computers, cell phones or the Internet are forms of medium, and the content is the way humans live in the symbiosis with those media. The life we used to know has been broken into fragments, forcing us to be tiny dots with secret identities in a huge, complicated network.

The market of identities

Where do people sell things? If you lived in a city, you would tend to go to supermarket to buy almost everything needed for daily life. Amazon is another option if you are too lazy to move yourself like most people nowadays. But if you want to sell YOU, where can you go?

People who have fame or gain fame thanks to the Internet vary from camgirls, influencers, mukbang eaters to traditional celebrities. These people manage the way they appear in public because they count on that to earn money. In 2014, Ellen DeGeneres twitted “If only Bradley’s arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars”. The tweet went public with a selfie photo of the post owner and some other movie stars such as Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, Julia Robert, Bradley Cooper. A photo of Ellen only would not go that viral, but the participation of the other stars made the world crazy. That star team was attending one of the most famous cinema events – the Oscar. They still spared a minute to take a selfie. You may wonder why it is important to mention that the photo was a selfie. This kind of photo doesn’t require either professional photography skills or high-cost phones. Therefore, selfies equalise people. If you own a phone with a camera, you can become a part of the game.

The selfie made the stars look more like common people, sold a more friendly (yet expensive) image of them to the audience. Do you think the idea of taking that selfie popped up in Ellen’s mind spontaneously? I don’t think so. Anything happened in the show was decided to happen. That wasn’t a naïve shot but was, in fact, an active action of identity creation, modification and selling.

Who sells online identity to make money has to put effort into making that identity likeable. There is more than one way to achieve that goal. Instagram is a platform of photos; therefore, it is the perfect place for so-called rick kids to sell their luxurious lives. RKOI stands for “Rick Kids of Instagram” – a phenomenon of young adults who update their accounts with photos of expensive watches, bags, boots, cars or vacations.

Another way to be famous intentionally is creating a cultural distance between the identity producer and the audience. Mukbang videos wherein the eaters usually eat a load of food are quite common in Asia. However, they are still something strange and exciting for western watchers. Additionally, an internet celebrity can also attract viewers by being an expert in something. Each YouTube influencer tends to focus on one thing that he/she is good at – travelling, food or beauty products reviewing, makeup, technology, etc. Last but not least, don’t forget to keep your identity visible by updating about your life on a strict schedule.

All people using the Internet sell a part of themselves which might be personal information – such as name, age, gender – or diet recipes, #ootd, “a day in my life”. The Internet must be the strangest market, where people are willing to recreate and edit themselves, and then, offer the new identity to get benefit. When it comes to benefit, fame comes before money. That’s strange.

Who will you be on the Internet?

The front stage is not for everyone

I’m always bad at taking selfies. To be honest, cameras don’t like me. They always add more weight and find a way to distort my face. Well, that may be an excuse for my bad selfies. But there’s another reason for my negative attitude towards selfies. Whenever I take a selfie, I have the feeling that I’m performing in front of many people although the only one I’m looking at is myself.

In the book Ways of Seeing, John Berger presents the idea of how women watch themselves being watched by men. For a man, watching is a one-way road: the watcher watches the watched. For a woman, the situation is more complicated. Each woman, according to Berger, splits herself into two people: one of them is the one being watched by men, the other observes how the first one being watched. Thank you, John Berger, for understanding the women’s mind.

Similarly, whenever I take a selfie and post it to, for example, Instagram, I am looked at by my followers and, at the same time, watch how the followers react to my photo. Since I concern about the fact that cameras hate me, I always try to choose the photo that looks most alike to the real me, or in fact, looks thinnest and cutest. I am aware that I need to post photos that guarantee the highest number of likes. I am the director at the backstage and the actress at the front stage at the same time. The main job is to produce an image that can satisfy the community on the platform I’m participating. For Instagram, the image can look more artistic and self-centred because this is where people are allowed to talk less and look more narcissistic. For Facebook, I can be more casual but still need to make sure my posts are informative enough to start some conversations in the comment section. As you can see, producing your online identities requires serious investment. You have to give priority to your audiences before thinking for yourselves. I am not rooting for the idea of pretending to be someone else to make your audiences satisfied. Obviously, what you put to the “front stage” has to be a part of yourself. As Goffman indicates in his book, “fronts tend to be selected, not created.” Just think twice before revealing that part.

But what if somebody creates a brand-new online identity for you and unfortunately, it makes people see you in the wrong way? Since online identity is made of data, it can be fake. Guy Babcock’s reputation has been destroyed because a woman has created a wrong story about him on the Internet, making him a pedophile. Since today, the decision-making process is based on data, that wrong information would ruin Babcock’s life. And because we tend to Google new acquaintances to learn more about them, the search result about guy Babcock would make a bad impression.

Performing on the Internet is, therefore, risky. In Vietnam, working as a vlogger or YouTuber has become a trend for several years. One of the popular vloggers chose to call himself He Always Smiles. During the first period of his YouTube career, he always wore a carton box on his head and never took it off. His face and his identity were questioned. Some people would see it as a trick to attract more followers, and obviously, it worked that way. But also, I see it as a way to protect himself from the Internet community. Since they didn’t know who he really was, they couldn’t realise him on the street or cyberbully him as they have done to many other celebrities who perform at the front stage showing their real faces.

Once you join the Internet, try to answer this question first: Do you want to wear the box, or are you brave enough to perform without it?

Aren’t we enough, or do we really need technology?

Do you have FOMO? At some point in our lives, I believe all of us have the fear that if we don’t stay updated, we will be left behind. And I believe FOMO is the perfect excuse for the Internet, computers and mobile phones to sneak into our lives. Thanks to them, I won’t miss any news about the vaccination process in the world, the royal funeral in the UK or the shooting in Paris. Technology is artificial (they even have artificial intelligence) — in a good way. Our phones, computers, bikes, cars are our artificial ears, brain, legs and speed. Five years ago, Elon Musk said that we were cyborgs because we all have our digital versions of ourselves, and we are having a symbiosis with machines. I’m not a fan of the guy’s personality but I can’t lie that I agree with him. Furthermore, the idea of being cyborgs is a little scary but so much exciting. Have you seen what Cyborg can do as a member of the Justice League (please make sure that you see the director cut version)? I won’t say it’s totally imagination. Swedes have implanted microchips under their skin for years — that’s no imagination at all.

However, there are always two sides of the same coin. The addition of technology — or the intelligence of technology — sometimes reflects how we don’t feel enough being normal people. PredPol (predictive policing) is the software programme that helps the police predict “where and when a crime occurs based on data sets of past crimes.” As what the software does is predicting, the result of its prediction would be unpredictable, and there is the possibility that its prediction can be inaccurate. Since I have heard about this technology, I have questioned why real humans need this kind of assistance.

The first book about big data that I have read is Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. The book presents the idea that nowadays, we tend to make decisions based on data. The difference between this new decision-making process and the traditional one is that the correlation between data and the decisions is not the cause-effect relation. It means that although living in an area with a high crime rate does not ensure that you will commit a crime in the future, PredPol may still put you on the list of potential crime. In that case, who can we blame — the software programme or the policeman who uses it?

“Smart” has been a buzz word — smartphone, smart refrigerator, smart city. All of the smart devices undertake many tasks — filtering spam emails, tracking groceries or, uhm…, what does a smart city really do? Anyways, looking back to the past, fire was one of the smartest finding of humans that keeps us warm, safe and full. Along the time, we fully understand how fire works. However, not many of us understand how our smartphones, smart refrigerators and smart cities are constructed. Today smart inventions stay mysterious to most of the people who are using them. Furthermore, technology does not always play the role of assistants. If you don’t live in Italy, you probably have many chances to use the service of Uber — the largest taxi firm in the world that owns no cars. In Vietnamese, we call the people who drive that kind of taxis “technology drivers.” They have to use their cars, they receive low income, and the company doesn’t want to guarantee them any promotion.

Technology or no technology — it’s not the question if we should keep using our smartphones and computers. It is, actually, a question that reminds us to keep the balance between being smart as normal people and asking technology for help with decision-making. And in case a wrong decision is made, it is us to take responsibility, not the machines that we create.

My beloved kids, do you want to learn code?

In Vietnam, my country, we don’t know much about data. Kids don’t want to add their parents on Facebook, but “data privacy” is a term that sounds strange and fancy. Sometimes people see diagrams, bars and charts on some journalistic articles, but since we don’t get used to reading them, we would skip them and continue with the written text and normal photos. That’s why I was excited to see a group of the very first people who decide to teach Vietnamese data. Their project is called DATAcracy program — Data + Democracy. That’s a cool name for an important mission that would start a new education path for Vietnamese kids. More than twenty years ago, I learned how to read on my first days at school. In about five years, if I get married in Vietnam, the alphabet and data can be my children’s first lessons.

There’s just one thing that bothers me about that group. I skimmed their posts on both their Facebook page and website and wondered: “Where’s code? Where does it come in? Or don’t they teach code?”. One would say that if someone wants to know how to code, they already can choose from many tutors — Coursera, Udemy or even YouTube. But I have my reasons to ask DATAcracy for a code course. Those tutors may be able to teach my kids how to code but they don’t guide them through the journey of seeing, thinking about and perceiving code. “Why does it matter?” — you would stop me right here. Well, if you wear a pair of code glasses, you can see how code is redesigning our world and sometimes separates us from each other.

I tried to think about code as the language of computers — I speak Vietnamese, you must be able to speak English (that’s why you’re still reading my rant), and computers speak code. It turns out to be an incomplete view “because code has so many interoperating systems, human and machine-based, meaning proliferates in code.” Code was first given birth by humans, or more specifically, a group of people who understand code. Before being a universal language of machines, it used to be the personal voice of the coder. This language, therefore, divides human beings into two groups — the people who understand code and the ones who don’t. “Why does it matter?” — you may ask again because there are many people who don’t understand Vietnamese and they are still doing just fine. But, my friend, code is becoming similar to English. Today, if you speak English, you are not special, but if you can’t speak English, you will have many disadvantages. I know I’m right about this because I come from a country where from the first day we go to school, we have to try hard to study English.

Code is becoming more popular. Furthermore, it’s making some crucial decisions in our life. Joy Buolamwini is a PhD candidate at MIT Media Lab. She wants to create an inspiring filter that whenever she looks at herself in the mirror, that filter can give her a look of someone or something that inspires her — for example, Serena Williams. That’s when she realises that the computer vision software she uses does not recognise her face very well unless she wears a white mask. Yes, Joy is a black woman.

Joy’s story is just one of many similar stories about how code is working better in some specific conditions, prioritising some specific people and, therefore, making other people’s lives harder. A CV is often scanned by software before being transferred to a human employer. If the code building that software works the same way as that code that doesn’t recognise Joy, Joy’s CV would be rejected. Who would we blame, the code or the coder? Or the teacher of the coder who did not cover the topic of how to see, think about and perceive code?

When I was an undergraduate student, marketing used to be a hot trend. Unfortunately, I chose to learn journalism. Today, when code is popular, I still find it hard to follow this new trend. But it seems like in the near future, knowing code is still helpful to get a well-paid job. I want my children to learn code since they are kids. Of course, I want them to have good jobs, but more importantly, I want to make sure they understand the code they build. If not, who knows what kind of people they will become — a hacker, Mark Zuckerberg, or someone worse?