If you read my previous post about managing online identities, you might be thinking, “Okay, I see how all of the material online is searchable, persistent and being linked together, but how are impressions really being formed online?”

At Personal Democracy Forum, Thomas Friedman quipped, “Whatever can be done online, will be done, and the question is, will it be done by you or to you?” A friend of mine suggested that instead of, or in addition to “to you” the question might be will it be done for you.

So, how are impressions formed online? Years ago, I was active in an online community where an anthropology professor would bring his students for an introduction to field work online. One year they did research on how impressions were formed online and Professor Jacobson wrote up the experience in a paper, Impression Formation in Cyberspace: Online Expectations and Offline Experiences in Text-based Virtual Communities. (I was part of the study.)

In the text-based environment, the students did not have access to pictures, so they interacted with people and hypothesized what the people would look like. They were later shown pictures of the people they interacted with. It was interesting to see how the students viewed me.

In the MyBlogLog community, there are different clues that we pick up. Everyone has an image. Often they are portraits. Yet they could be of just about anything. The choice of image says something and as I surf, I make guesses about whether or not a site is one I’ll be interested in visiting based on the image. When you click on the image, you see a bunch of tags identifying the person. Many of these are submitted by the MyBlogLog members themselves, but they can be submitted by others. The lack of tags says one thing about people. People have commented about skipping past any user that has SEO in their tags.

There is also indicate about how frequently a person uses MyBlogLog. When did they first join? When was the last time they were logged in? How many Sites do they author? How many communities are they part of? How many friends do they have, how many people have joined their blogs community? What are the messages that have been left, and what additional information has been added by the user. People have commented about skipping past any user that has over a thousand friends for similar reasons that they skip people with SEO in their tags.

Beyond all of this, there are impressions to be formed when you visit the blog itself. Is it using a default format, or has it been updated? Does the blog allow comments? How many people are commenting? Is there a blogroll? What does the blogroll say about the person? People have commented about how I have links to conservatives mixed in with my progressive links and they aren’t sure what to make of it. (I want to promote dialog and deliberation). Then, there are all the meme graphics that people have up.

All of this before we even really get to the content. That is probably worth many blog posts in and of itself. I commit the cardinal blogging sin of writing on lots of different topics. Other people are incredibly focused on a single topic.

Yesterday I received a fascinating post from Joyce Hopewell who writes about ‘astrological psychology’. She wrote:

Hi Aldon, You wrote another thought-provoking post about authority. I'd been thinking along similar lines for a while now about blogs & considering what gives a blog authenticity. Where is the author coming from? Is it place of ego or service? Are they genuinely sharing or out to impress? What kind of quality or feel does the blog have? And how do I feel about it? (that was your final question, I believe). I guess I use my eyes and senses quite a bit when I read blogs and tend either not to hang around long/or go in at more depth based on this initial, and - in the context of astrological psychology! - Jupiterian impression.

When I read that the first time, I thought ‘Jungian interpretation’ instead of ‘Jupiterian impression’. While I’m more interested in the effect of our unconscious on blogging than the effect of my date of birth, I imagine that Joyce would suggest that my date of birth shapes my unconscious. We all have our own frameworks for making sense out of what we experience. What are yours?