i was working on my online profile for one of the social networks i belong to the other day.  like many social networks, this one asks its users for a short block of text that summarizes their essence.  i had no clue how to do this (i don’t think it’s possible to summarize things that you don’t understand), so I read other people’s profiles in order to get a feel for what sort of things i should be saying about myself.

a number of the profiles i read indicated that the person writing the profile hated/didn’t care for writing the ‘about me’ portion.  no one seemed to complain about listing their favorite music or books or movies, so it seems like this distaste for talking about yourself is limited to context-free, blank-piece-of-paper situations.

i think there are two dimensions to this discomfort– internal and external.  internally, we feel like we’re far too complicated and interesting to be summed up in a few sentences.  externally, we obsess over what other people think of us, and desperately try to figure out how to express ourselves in such a way that the people we care about will like us and think of us in the way we wish to be thought of.

as i read, it occured to me that there were a few different broad patterns people used when writing their profiles, and better yet, they could be easily mapped to several of the major post-renaissance art movements.

1. baroque/mannerist:  highly stylized, offers a vision of the writer as a perfect combination of the attributes that they value most highly.
2. realist:  a portrayal of a person as they really are, usually with more emphasis on their warts than is necessary.  often written by someone with a fascinating lack of self-consciousness.
3. impressionist:  vague but pleasing.  when done effectively, allows the reader to fill in what they want to see.
4. cubist:  a sequence of short snippets or references to likes, dislikes, interests, thoughts, or emotions, the thinking being that we get a better feel for who people are by seeing a number of different dimensions in rapid succession.

i suppose it makes sense, when you think about it– as a species, we’ve only figured out a handful of ways to react when confronted with a blank space that we’re supposed to fill in with some piece of ourselves.

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