The world modelA composite, not a person
Fatima
45Rotterdam
Logistics planner
Two entirely different people on two platforms, and treating her as one of them is the standard mistake.
At a glance
Online
- The commute
- Sunday afternoon
Where
- LinkedIn because the train ride is exactly one industry-news scroll long.
- Pinterest because the garden, the kitchen, and one board she shows no one.
In the field
Reads, never postsEvenings
The day
On the eight-fifteen she is a professional: industry news, a supplier’s announcement, the occasional colleague’s new job. She reads with the seriousness of someone whose work depends on knowing what moved. She has never posted anything.
On Sunday afternoon she is a gardener with a board full of raised beds and a kitchen she is not going to build. The same person, the same phone, and no overlap at all in what she wants.
Field notes
What is observable about this kind of audience, and the published work that describes it.
01Distinct audiences, distinct selves
People present differently to different audiences, and a platform is an audience. Where those audiences collapse into one, the presentation becomes incoherent to both (Goffman, 1959; Marwick and boyd, 2011).
02Regularity is rare and usable
Forty minutes, twice a day, at fixed times. Most audiences do not have a schedule this stable, and where it exists it is a stronger description of availability than any stated preference.
03Aspiration is not intent
One of her boards is a plan and the other is a daydream. They are behaviourally identical at the moment of saving and completely different in what follows, which is a hard limit on what a save alone can tell you.
Who sits nearby
Nearness in the field is behavioural, not geographic. The unnamed individuals around a reference persona are people whose observable behaviour resembles theirs.
References
- Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books.
- Marwick, A. E. and boyd, d. (2011). I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience. New Media & Society, 13(1).