Disclosure

Disclosure
Discloure: a way of saying opening that implies that what is shown was previously hidden.
An interesting conversation with John Howard. Disclosure is at the heart of what technologies work and what do not, I think. For example, text messaging works because it hides more than it reveals - because it allows us to engage in perception management.
So, the basic dynamics: the tension between what we are and what we want to be (the ideal self and self perception), the relationship between self and other. Both busy spaces, full of fractal transactions.

And the outcomes: first the familiar one - people prefer virtual conferencing to video conferencing (because they can present themselves 'in game' as their ideal self). So would we hypothesise that bloggers are 'actualised individuals' or not?
Do we classify technologies along a spectrum of disclosure: those that expose us and those that, in transforming us, hide us?

A text message is short, easily a lie. A blog is longer, and exposes us more competely. A mmorg clothes us almost completely. Who would use the general channel and risk being exposed as less than superhuman? Exposing technologies are used by the delusional, the high self-monitor, the actualised.

For the vast majority, then, technology must provide us with tools to better manage our transactions with 'the other' (a kind of perception arms race?) and with ourselves. Tools like email allow us to hold 'the other' at a distance - how many misunderstandings are fostered through email, organisational barriers and impersonality maintained? Email as a masking technology, then. Masking ourselves doubly: once from the other, once from ourselves.
Why do you not blog? Did you say you have no time? And yet you have time for email. What is the reason? Will you even ask?