The concept of "saving face" (western eqivalent is preserving honor) is a key regulator of human social intercourse
Is the concept of face ubiquitous? What does reputation communicate?
Cultures differ on morality, and ethics. In my opinion morality is subjectively defined and is heavily dependent on cultural and social norms. One concept which seems near universal is the concept of face or prestige. It is this concept which mediates the relation between how an individual thinks of themselves and how others think of them. How your peers think of you is the source of all prestige. We can think of this as a sort of beauty measurement where by adopting respectable behaviors an individual can approach the current socially defined "behavioral beauty standard. The behavioral beauty standard are the behaviors deemed of high value or worth to society, and or to the peer group the individual is trying to make and maintain a good impression with. So management of impression could be thought of as a form of public relations if a corporation does it, but in an individual we might call this "reputation" or "prestige".
At least in western society (as I cannot speak for any other), it is trivially easy to lose reputation. Any error made at any point in a life time an result in a destroyed reputation which takes many years to build. As we see with social media, there is a lot more pressure to do something regrettable due to the design of some of these apps than there are opportunities to enhance prestige or social standing.
Serious questions for all who would like to improve or maintain their social standing
- Should young individuals refrain from using apps which by design mechanism encourage "deviant" behaviors?
- Do we want to do away with the concept of privacy and as a consequence adopt a culture around reputation management (face saving)?
- Is our personal and professional brand truly the most important component for being perceived as "good" or "ethical"?
These are just some questions to offer for debate. The trend is currently toward a more open and transparent society. It is also important to note that this trend could lead to a very boring constrained future where it is the norm to be extremely away of anything which can potentially damage one's reputation (associations with certain people, usage of certain social media, certain political activities, certain jobs/types of employment). And where does Steem fit into all of this? Every post is stored on the blockchain forever, and not every post anyone makes is going to be "high quality" or "respectable". In this way Steem is an experiment in aggressive transparency and openness just as Facebook was, but with data permanence unavailable to any other technology as what you say is literally signed and stored indefinitely in the blockchain.
Every petty dispute, argument, debate, disagreement, display of anger, or sadness, or envy, all are stored forever, accessible by anyone.
Great article Dana as always. Loved your thought process indeed.
Regards Nainaz
#thealliance
Interesting post. Being that we're emotional beings it is scary to think that our posts are forever accessible. For me it does discourages me from arguing and rather keep things positive.
The truth is every human has emotions. The challenge is knowing when, where, how, to reveal those emotions, and what the rules are for any given environment. For instance on Steem there are hidden rules, which exist in the brains of persons of influence on the Steem platform. They do not reveal these rules anywhere but will enforce it when you or I violate.
To me that is the biggest problem (the rules you don't know exist which still get enforced). This reveals that the challenge is actually all about managing how others think about you, and you often have no clue how they think about you at least on a platform like this. In some environments you have meta data, and this meta data does give you come clues, but on Steem you do not have the analytics capability that you may have on other platforms.
If anything, Steem is an experiment, but it lacks important features to favor the individual in understanding their audience. I would suggest Steem as a community develop the tools necessary to allow the blogger to know their audience. Ideally the blogger and audience are suppose to grow together, by way of a feedback loop between the two.
#life
Charles Swindoll:Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.I recognize all humans will make mistakes (it is inherent to being mortal). What difference is how the individual recovers and whether or not lessons are learned from each mistake. A recovery is to make a mistake, gather a deep understanding by analyzing both the actions and consequences that follow, and avoid doing the same mistake twice.
That is if indeed it was a mistake which is for each individual to define by the standards they accept as important.
We all probably need to be careful what we put here.
Personally I think, that people here get rewarded for their post, there might be an overflow of low quality posts and comments (what I already observed in many cases).
Good article, good thoughts.
All the best to you.
Peter.
Openness leads to the development of a healthy immune system, as Andreas Antonopoulos (see video in my blog) puts it, at least as far as the blockchain is concerned. In order to be open as a participant in society, one must be able to deal with criticism. Respectively learning to be immune to it. I'm one of those people who do not do what the masses do. And for that one is criticized by the crowd. But I've learned to handle it. And live well with it.
Sure this can help bockchains but people aren't algorithms. People cannot be individuals or unique if not for privacy. So the question is how much do we value unique individuality vs whatever the benefits of increased openness are?
From a technical point of view I like Enigma because it does value privacy in it's design which is more than we can say for Steemit thus far. But it is worth having the debate on the side effects of either paradigm.
Well all of that will happen if people stay buthurt snowflakes that think that everything is relativ.
And Steemit isn't transparent anyone here can put up a show they want as much as they do on FB.
Also your last point would only be the case if every human interaction was rendered digital or if we'd live in full blown technocratic dictatorship. But all of that is very unlikely.
Every human interaction is becoming digital as the sensors become smaller and more ubiquitous.