What does it mean to be “socially and culturally honest“ about oneself when using CMC systems to interact?

With the ubiquity of the Internet and all its possible uses continually being discovered and expanded, defining this personal baseline of truth becomes more and more a central issue for communicating the ultimate message: a person’s integrity.

It appears to me that people discern and shift their ideas of the importance of the self-monitoring needed to “stay true” to one’s core integrity. Depending on the context and the function of the interaction it becomes more or less important to be socially and culturally honest. Is it a professional context? A social context? Or both? Consider this simple but essential fact of modern life: “…the rise of the Internet has clarified that this technology is fundamentally social (Parks and Roberts, 1998; Sproull and Faraj, 1997)” (Baym, N. 2006, p.35). Given that it is the Age of the Internet and that it is not possible to effectively and fully separate professional from social contexts, doesn’t one’s display of integrity become an even more important issue?

I believe that individuals should, morally speaking, have to (and do) exercise a core baseline of telling the truth about themselves. Telling the truth in this way is essential both on and offline. Nancy Baym contends in her article “Interpersonal Life Online” that Computer Mediated Communication’s (CMC) interpersonal opportunities are its most important” (Baym, N. 2006, p.35). This to me means we have even more opportunities and responsibilities now to make every person-to-person interaction more authentic and to make them really matter.

Whether we are on or offline, being “whole” as a person always has a universe of implications. In a cultural context of any kind, the social disposition an individual exports to others does have a particular implication – that being they serve as a representative of their culture, whether they are conscious of this fact or not.

Baym, N. (2006). Interpersonal Life Online. In L. Lievrouw & S. Livingstone (Eds.), The Handbook of New Media, Updated Student Edition (35-54). London: Sage.