Digipsyche

Personality types have always intrigued me, well my own self and the ones around me. In my search to understand the way people behave and react to situations I have devoured a number of books ranging from the usual Linda Goodman to some obscure Fourth way system literature. I will accept that I have not been exceptionally successful. But over the last few years I have been noticing a new dimension of human personality, something that never existed till this decade.

I have to credit one of my friends for generating this curiosity in me. He is one person I have known for quite sometime and ask anybody you will come to understand that he is a man of few words. But all this was only till he added me as a friend in his Orkut list. His profile indeed came across as a whiff of fresh air and he started to come across as a stylish and expressive young man. I never thought that this guy had such a sassy side to himself. His status messages were witty, his pictures dapper and to top it all he had women throng up the scraps.

I did met him sometime later. He was still the same guy, nice and quiet. I could not manage to ask him what made him play Remo in cyberspace, and never will I.

And this is not one random observation. I have now started noticing scores of people demonstrating sides of themselves I never knew, albeit only on cyberspace. Well, we all have read about chat forums making people more expressive when incognito but this I believe is new phenomena. My conjecture is that social profiles are helping people be what they want to be and may be at times gives them more time to react, than when in real life situations. And for God's sake this is not MPD. I don't know if this is already a subject of research in universities. If not, may I request the world of well qualified psychologists to please start taking note.

And before I sign off this post, let me muster up some conviction and do a first ever coining a term thingy - a person's digital personality shall henceforth be known as 'digipsyche' :-)