While we present ourselves online, which is obviously the focus of Ego Media as the whole project, we always do so on a platform. So this can be Twitter or Instagram or, if you go back a few decades, that could be Usenet or ICQ. So my project then was to shed some light on the relation between that platform and the self-presentation, the self-expression. The people that made those platforms or the organizations have made those platforms obviously had some ideas about how people would be using them, what they could do with them. And that leads to a certain set of affordances and features. And my goal was to find out how that process works. So, do they follow those initial ideas? Do they find their own uses for it? And is there a difference between platforms, between design philosophies? For that comparison I looked at Twitter which, I guess, everyone is familiar with, and IRC, which is a platform from the late 80s.
Originally my thought was that maybe I could interview people at Twitter, or track down the people that created IRC back in the day and, maybe, ask them questions. But while doing that, it turned out that that would be complicated because in the case of IRC, a lot of those people just aren’t around anymore, or very hard to find. And in the case of Twitter it’s a very big company that, obviously, doesn’t want to really reveal too much about itself and its design process. And, on the other hand, while looking at this, I found out that there’s actually a lot of material out there, that’s from the time that these platforms were designed. So, design documents, blog posts, mailing lists, netzines.
We’ve only just arrived at the point where we can really talk about a history of the internet – a history of online social media. So there’s a lot of uncovered ground there. People are remarkably creative in how they appropriate these platforms for their own needs. And, yeah, perhaps that is… in that way my research is testament to to our creativity in expressing ourselves.
