I think this is a great NYTimes article. What strikes me is the 44 year old chef on the Facebook. I remember Facebook when it first started around late 2003/early 2004. It was just a few schools and you could only be friends with people in those schools. Also, it was so much simpler and I still miss the "my friends and my friends' friends only" can see my profile. Oh those were the days. Also I guess the article is just relevant to the whole Jdate/match.com etc. world.
Putting Your Best Cyberface Forward
DO you bite your nails? Have you pierced your tongue? Is your tote bag emblazoned with the words “I’m not a plastic bag”?
People look and act the way they do for reasons too numerous to fit into any therapist’s notebook. Yet we commonly shape our behavior or tweak our appearance in an attempt to control how others perceive us.
Some call it common sense. Social scientists call it “impression management” and attribute much of their understanding of the process to the sociologist Erving Goffman, who in a 1959 book, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” likened human interactions to a theatrical performance.
Now that first impressions are often made in cyberspace, not face-to-face, people are not only strategizing about how to virtually convey who they are, but also grappling with how to craft an e-version of themselves that appeals to multiple audiences — co-workers, fraternity brothers, Mom and Dad.
“Which image do you present?” asked Mark R. Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, who has been studying impression management in the real world for more than 20 years. Like other scholars, he is now examining the online world through the lens of impression management — studies that sometimes put an academic gloss on insights that seem obvious, and at other times yield surprising results.
“We’ve been struck by the dilemma people are in,” Mr. Leary said of a study he began last month about how people edit their online personas. “Some people seem to pick an audience. Other people pick and choose the best parts of themselves. As a professor, my Facebook page is just watered down. I can’t have pictures of me playing beer pong.”
People, of course, have been electronically styling themselves for as long as there has been a Web to surf. But scholars say the mainstreaming of massive social networking and dating sites — which make it easy to publicly share one’s likes, dislikes, dreams and losses in a modern mutation of the Proust Questionnaire — is prompting more people to “perform” for one another in increasingly sophisticated ways.
Indeed, today’s social networking and dating sites are “like impression management on steroids” said Joseph B. Walther, a professor of communication and telecommunication at Michigan State University. But because they are still new forms of communication, “people don’t have a very strong sense yet of what they’re doing or what the best practices are,” he said.
Among Mr. Walther’s findings is that the attractiveness of the friends on your Facebook profile affects the way people perceive you. In a study to be published this year in Human Communication Research, a journal, Mr. Walther and colleagues found that Facebook users who had public postings on their wall (an online bulletin board) from attractive friends were considered to be significantly better looking than people who had postings from unattractive friends.
“We disproved the Paris Hilton hypothesis,” said Mr. Walther, explaining that this traces to a quote attributed to Ms. Hilton: “All you have to do in life is go out with your friends, party hard and look twice as good” as the woman next to you.
“That’s not true,” Mr. Walther said.
Many of the self-presentation strategies observed by scholars will seem obvious to experienced Internet users: improving one’s standing by linking to high status friends; using a screen name like “Batman” or “007” when in reality one is more like Austin Powers; referring to one’s gleaming head as “shaved” not “bald”; using cutesy emoticons to charm the demographic that forwards inspirational chain mail; demonstrating leadership by being the first to adopt and turn others onto the latest Facebook applications; listing one’s almost-career as a D.J. or model rather than the one that pays the bills; making calculated decisions about what to list as interests or favorite books.
“If someone lists some obscure Romanian title, is that person really smart or are they pretentious?” said Judith Donath, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who studies social aspects of computing.
In one study of online dating, professors at Rutgers, Georgetown and Michigan State found that in the absence of visual and oral cues, single people develop their own presentational tactics: monitoring the length of their e-mail messages (too wordy equals too desperate); limiting the times during which they send messages (a male subject learned that writing to women in the wee hours makes them uncomfortable); and noting the day they last logged on (users who visit the site too infrequently may be deemed unavailable or, worse, undesirable).
The scholars found it common for online daters to fudge their age or weight, or to post photographs that were five years old. Also, the world is round and the chemical symbol for water is H2O.
In general, scholars do not think of impression management as an intentionally deceptive or nefarious practice. It is more like social lubrication without a drink in your hand. Those studying it online have found that when people misrepresent themselves, it is often because they are attempting to express an idealized or future version of themselves — someone who is thinner or has actually finished Dante’s “Inferno.”
“Everyone felt pretty strongly that they tried to be honest,” said Jennifer Gibbs, one of the authors of the online dating study and an assistant professor of communication at Rutgers. (N.B.: Ms. Gibbs met her husband on Match.com.) “They justified slight misrepresentations or distortions on trying to stand out,” she said, adding that online and offline, people experience tension between telling the truth and showcasing themselves in the most flattering light.
Some misrepresentation stems from the actual structure of networking sites. For instance, people who decide to grow younger on dating Web sites often do so by a couple of years because they would otherwise be filtered out of search results that use age brackets. Ms. Gibbs said most people had “no qualms” about forgetting a few birthdays as long as they came clean upon meeting someone.
Coming clean about misrepresentations is less of an issue on social networking sites, where people are not as likely to deviate too far from the truth because their network of friends will simply call them on it. Scholars do suggest, though, that the photographs people post on the sites are about more than showing what individuals look like. Rather, members carefully choose photos to display aspects of their personalities.
Catherine Dwyer, a lecturer at Pace University who studies online behavior, said young men on MySpace commonly do this by posing with their cars.
“I use photos that describe me,” said Leonard Alonge, 44, a chef and actor in Delray Beach, Fla., who is a member of Facebook. “Photos of me in the kitchen, photos of me with friends. I use it to describe my personality: friendly, outgoing, nothing very explicit. I’m a pretty conservative person. I was raised in a Roman Catholic family.”
Clare Richardson, 17, of Los Angeles, is applying to colleges and is therefore mindful of what she posts on Facebook, but she knows teenagers who “want to appear to be the partying type,” she said. They post pictures that seem to prove it even if it is not true. “It’s clear they’re trying to impress everyone out there,” Ms. Richardson said.
Keith N. Hampton, an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said the notion of impressing “everyone out there” is the fundamental problem of networking sites. They are designed so that millions see the same image of a member.
For online impression management to be effective, Mr. Hampton said, the sites should be redesigned to allow people to reveal different aspects of their identity to different users. You should be able to present one face to your boss, and another to your poker buddies. “We have very real reasons for wanting to segment our social network,” he said.
But what of that breed of users who, despite all the warnings, could care less who sees what? They continue to post salacious photographs of themselves. They reveal deeply personal information. They inspire parental tsk-ing. They open themselves up to identity theft, hurt feelings and job loss.
And that may be the point.
“Today, posting revealing or culpable material online arguably has become another forum for signaling imperviousness to danger and repercussions,” Ms. Donath wrote in a paper published in October in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. “They may be indicating that their future is so secure that no social network site indiscretion would jeopardize it, or they may be showing their alienation from the sort of future where discretion is needed. For such users, the risk itself is the benefit.”
I also saw the ads for the new Celebrity Apprentice - what a motley crew of TV execs, boxing champs, Omarosa and Olympic Gold medalists for sports people don't really watch. Oh well.
Yesterday was the new episode of one of my favorite shows - Project Runway. I looooooooooove that show!!! Yesterday's premise was interesting - the designers had to go to Hershey's Times Square and get all the candy stuff in 5 minutes to create outfits later. One of the designers I am rooting for, Jillian, made a gorgeous red dress out of Twizzlers. It was great! I like how they make it into the drama as in "oh man I'll never finish this Twizzler dress b/c candy is coming off of it" and of course she did finish it and it was perfect. I am rooting for Christian, Jillian and/or Rani because the three of them are great.
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What a fun site!!! http://www.winkingskull.com/navigation.aspx
You can review your anatomy there :).
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Gotta love Slate
A Turn of the Corkscrew
How American sommeliers put their French counterparts to shame.
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2008, at 8:05 AM ET
To judge by all the reverence they are accorded, you'd think chefs were the most interesting people on the planet. In truth, they are sometimes not even the most interesting people in their own restaurants. Often, that distinction belongs to the sommelier. Not only are their life experiences frequently more varied than those of many chefs—wine cellars are crawling with academic overachievers and white-collar refugees—their motivations are also quite different. While high-end restaurant cooking in the United States is increasingly marked by the pursuit of celebrity and lucre, wine service is generally guided by another impulse: a desire to educate and enthuse. With their missionary zeal, America's sommeliers have helped convert us from a nation of beer chuggers into a land of Riesling aficionados. Along the way, they have revolutionized their own profession, turning a dead-end, white-men-only métier into an exemplar of upward mobility and diversity.
Although the role of wine waiter did not originate in France—it apparently dates back to the Greeks and Romans—the job took its modern form there, which was good in some respects, not so good in others. On the plus side, the French invested the otherwise ho-hum business of opening and pouring wine with ceremony and élan. On the down side, they brought a pronounced hauteur to the task. Like most stereotypes, the image of the surly French sommelier contains a kernel of truth—more than a kernel, actually. Condescension and humorlessness have long been defining features of French wine service, which can probably be attributed to two factors: Many French sommeliers came to the job not by choice but by conscription, and the position has usually been a life sentence. In France, the sommelier was often someone who entered the restaurant trade as a barely pubescent teen with dreams of becoming a chef (and no prospect of attending university). Then, deemed unworthy of a place at the stove, our man (and it was always a man) got shunted off to the wine cellar, where he was condemned to spend the rest of his working days in the shadow of the egomaniacal prick who beat him out in the kitchen. This was not a recipe for service with a smile. The word sommelier is derived from an Old French term for "beast of burden," and French sommeliers have tended to go about their work with an attitude befitting that etymology.
By contrast, professional wine service is a recent phenomenon in the United States (it only really started in the 1980s), and took root in very different fashion. The pioneering figures here—Kevin Zraly (Windows on the World), Daniel Johnnes (Montrachet), Larry Stone (Charlie Trotter's, Rubicon)—were all college-educated and came to wine out of passion, not because they were frog-marched into the bottle room. They saw their role as mainly pedagogical, an outlook perfectly tailored to a time when Americans were developing an interest in wine. They made wine service educational, and they made it fun. They also brought an entrepreneurial spirit to the work; rather than let the role of sommelier define them, they defined it.
Consider, for instance, Johnnes, now (along with Stone) the dean of American sommeliers. In 1985, Drew Nieporent put him in charge of the wine service at Montrachet, a restaurant he was opening in Tribeca. Johnnes, taking his inspiration from the restaurant's name—Montrachet is the grandest of grand cru white Burgundies—assembled a spectacular cellar, and he and the wine list became the restaurant's star attractions (not that the food wasn't also good). In the late '80s, Johnnes began bringing in some of the unknown wines that he had discovered on trips to France. Today, the 52-year-old New Yorker has a thriving import business with a roster full of impressive names, oversees wine operations for Daniel Boulud's restaurant group, and has even become a winemaker himself: He is now producing a small amount of red Burgundy with the help of Frédéric Mugnier, one of the region's most esteemed vignerons, and is also doing an Oregon pinot noir with the assistance the talented Eric Hamacher. He also hosts what is unquestionably the world's greatest wine event, La Paulée de New York (a bacchanal modeled after the annual postharvest festival in Meursault) and has become Burgundy's de facto American ambassador.
Younger sommeliers are following similar paths. Richard Betts, the 36-year-old wine boss at the Little Nell in Aspen, Colo., is a refugee from academia. He had just completed a masters in geology in 1996 and was heading off to law school when an epiphanic bottle of Italian wine persuaded him to abandon con law and torts before he'd even started and to pursue a career in gastronomy instead. Now, in addition to his day job at the highly acclaimed Little Nell, Betts is producing wine under his own label on three continents—in Napa Valley, in Australia's Barossa Valley, and in France's northern Rhône Valley, where he has the help of the brilliant young winemaker Jean-Louis Chave.
But no American sommelier has had greater success using the cellar door as a portal to other opportunities than Andrea Robinson (previously Andrea Immer). A former investment banker, Robinson began her wine career working for Zraly at Windows on the World. Today, she is America's foremost wine personality and popularizer, with multiple books, DVDs, television shows, and industry gongs (including a master sommelier degree) to her credit. Encouraged by Robinson's example, women have come flooding into restaurant wine service, to the point where it is becoming blessedly harder to find a top American table that doesn't have at least one female sommelier. By contrast, I have personally ever seen only one woman wine steward in a French three-star restaurant, and she was an apprentice from Japan. The profession in France remains a fraternity in the truest sense of the term.
And it is not just in the realm of gender that America has changed the sommelier beat: Wine service in the United States is also multiethnic and multiracial. African-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Korean-Americans, and many other hyphenated Americans are now pouring Cabernets and Chardonnays professionally. One of the country's brightest young sommeliers is Indian-born Rajat Parr, who oversees wine for San Francisco chef Michael Mina's restaurant conglomerate. Parr, 35, says he didn't encounter any resistance when he was breaking into the sommelier trade and that the business is open to anyone with the knowledge and desire to hack it. "Just come and prove yourself," he says. Here, too, the contrast with France is vast. France may be a multicultural country, but wine service there is still a strictly Caucasian affair, and the few exceptions are made to feel their exceptionalness. Hideya Ishizuka, a Japanese sommelier who spent a decade working at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Bordeaux and who now owns a restaurant in Paris, recently told me that many French clients simply refused to accept the idea that he had wine advice worth heeding.
Parr says that trips to France early in his career taught him valuable lessons in how not to be a sommelier, but he thinks things are beginning to change there, a point echoed by Betts. They both say that younger French wine waiters, encouraged by the examples being set here, are showing clients greater respect and are trying to make the experience more convivial. The American model has perhaps been too successful: Johnnes worries that many newer sommeliers nowadays are so ambitious and in such a rush to become stars that they aren't willing to put in the time it takes to really master the craft. This, coupled with the fact that demand for skilled sommeliers is outstripping supply at the moment, suggests there may be problems ahead. On balance, though, these are good problems to have, and given a choice between American-style wine service and the traditional French approach, I'll stick with ours, thanks.
Who would have thought, 25 years ago, that anyone would ever say that?
Mike Steinberger is Slate's wine columnist.Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2180456/
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