Three simple tests to find real people behind online identities

On the internet, they say, nobody knows you are a dog. Peter Steiner, who drew the famous cartoon with this adage, may have a point about online identities taking a life of their own, a life that can often be distinctly divergent from one’s true self. But, of late, I have had some serious doubts about that. Is one’s social media identity really separate from one’s real identity in a philosophical sense? I don’t think so and here’s why.

I think we tremendously overestimate our ability to craft and maintain a certain online persona that is distinct from one’s real character. Being online 24x7 and divulging the nature of one’s breakfast in one breath and one’s frustrations with an ISP’s illegal music downloading site-blocking policies eventually, I feel, give people away. It’s a bit like how, in the past, we would be told to maintain a certain professional decorum and mien at office and not let personal things get in the way of being unproductive at work. But all of us know that despite the ties, formal shirts and ridiculously expensive leather shoes, we are the same bunch of egotistic, insecure selves who crave attention, search for recognition like the Americans did for weapons for mass destruction in Iraq and stab each other in the back with the dull edge of PowerPoint presentations. No one believes that we keep our true selves at home and come to office stripped of our basest human selves.

I think social media is no different. I believe the only difference is that at office, we pretend not to be unproductive while on social media, no such pretense is required. One is strategic notworking and the other, social notworking. Sure, the lack of actual physical interaction gives the illusion of a separate identity but given enough time, every cool, funny, bon-vivant social media personality turns out to be a perfectly ordinary human being, and I don’t say this in a bad way. It’s perfectly fine to be ordinary and even better to be honest about it.

It’s hard work to misrepresent oneself and funnily enough, this is true even for anonymous online identities, like say, someone with a Twitter handle like @CoolGangsta. Even if one were carefully crafting tweets about a specific theme and subject and sticking to that religiously, it must be pointed out that like most things religious, it’s easy to poke holes at its thin fabric of consistency. All one has to do is troll that person. Say bad and nasty things about him and watch how he responds. 999 times out of 1,000, it is not @CoolGangsta, but the ordinary human being behind that who will respond to unreasonable criticism.

It is supremely difficult to deal with trolling. In a sense, it’s like the internet’s nastier version of the Waiter Test. It is said that the true class of a person can be gauged by how he treats waiters at restaurants. True identities online, on the other hand, are best gauged by the ‘Troll Test.’ Tell someone their argument makes no sense, they will go searching for some ad hominem response. Tell them they look ugly, they will ascend the high pulpit of the ‘how cheap of you to consider looks important’ stance while ignoring the irony behind the fact that they picked their prettiest, Photoshopped, airbrushed, Instagrammed and Lightroomed profile picture in the first place.

Of course, it’s not good to troll. It is, in fact, despicable behavior, but the point is that how people respond to trolls reveals something so fundamentally basic about a person behind a fake online profile. If they respond with measured nonchalance, it says something. If it unleashes the floodgates of their innermost insecurities, it says something too.

Another test is the Flirt Test and this works particularly well with men. Want to find out what kind of person @CoolGangsta is? Create an online profile with a believably pretty looking female profile picture (in other words, do not use Aishwarya Rai as the profile pic) and express effusive admiration for the man and watch him, married, single, zombie or alien, come out into the open with that most indelicate of masculine flaws — the clumsy inability to deal with both praise and criticism from the other gender. Men flirt. Online men flirt even more. Anonymous online men flirt the most.

The third and final test is the Outrage Test. Folks on social media select topics to outrage about with almost sartorial precision. You may wear an Armani shirt, but you wear the ‘I support Anna Hazare’ on your sleeve in quite the same way. Track a person’s outrage choices carefully and it will tell you quite a bit about that person. I think I must write a Linda Goodmanesque book on the 12 Zodiac signs of outrage or something to that effect. Aries (Ram) could be chaps who secretly hate Muslims and want a temple to be built at Ayodhya but do not want to risk looking fundamentalist on Twitter. Taurus (Bull) could be chaps who campaign for vegetarianism but secretly eat Syrian beef at Mallu restaurants. And so on.

And, oh, I’d like to end this piece with a disclaimer. My dog did not type it.

Slightly techie, moderately musical, severely blogging, timepassly tweeting