 So, there's my name, there are a lot of hard part of Valden's best of confidence, and I love Malmö so much, and I'm so excited to be back, so thank you, Magnus and Martin and Yasmin, I think this place is magical, and mostly it's because of the people who make it that way. So, when I was here last year, I had just moved back from China, and I talked a lot about my research there around trust and identity, but this year I'm not going to talk about any of that, I'm going to talk about something totally different, I'm going to actually build off of some of the stuff that Anshou was talking about around political expression, but I'm going to talk about a political expression, I'm going to talk about emotional expression. So, hi, I'm Trisha Wong, and I'm a cultural sociologist, and I use ethnographic methods in my work, which means I spend a lot of time with people. I immerse myself into people's lives, I'll talk to anyone who is willing to talk to me, from teens to adults to migrants to makers, government bureaucrats or entrepreneurs, all to understand how people negotiate everyday life and self-expression. Now, usually I talk about the people I spend time with, I tell their stories, but today I'm going to do something totally different, I'm going to talk about myself, and I'm going to talk about what I do on Facebook and Tumblr, in order to explain a concept that I talked to a lot of organizations about, which is the elastic self. So, if there's any questions or anything that resonates with you, please tweet it to Elastic Self or on Twitter and at me where we can just chat afterwards. So, here's my Facebook page. So, Facebook represents a lot of the connections in my life, but Facebook's social graph actually doesn't accurately represent my connections. For one, I don't like being asked to divulge like every piece of information about my life, so my profile is a protest to that. I'm a politically conservative male from Quito, Ecuador, who graduated from the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna for peace negotiation among highly violent penguins and otters. And I also worked at the FBI as an informant on anti-patriotic crocodiles in the swamps of Pensacola, Florida. Now, some of this information is actually true, some of it's not, so you can figure out which. Now, I do this because I think Facebook's format is a bit rigid. Now, I use Facebook, I actually enjoy it. However, it's so restrictive that it's not conducive for a wide variety of self-expression. So, here's my Tumblr account, my dashboard. And I, Tricia, is my primary Tumblr where I post things that I find interesting. This is my cultural bite site on Tumblr where I write about my interests in my professional life as a sociologist or as a consultant in the public and private sector and as a community organizer. This is my other Tumblr, Digital Urbanisms, where I track my interests in urban computing and infrastructure. And this is my Crasion Mother Tumblr, where I document the things that my mother says to me on a daily basis through email, phone, and text. And there's a lot more. Anyway, so this is Fakiafa, where my friend Adrienne, I document our love for Vietnamese Pho soup. And this is my other Tumblr, Pussy Power, where I talk about the importance of reclaiming the word pussy to be associated with strength and not weakness. I track my favorite dance videos on Dance Bitch Dance. This is my other Tumblr, where I take on the voice of my internet-famous dog, Elle. And this is my Guston Concionius, where I track my favorite Spanish songs. So, Facebook and Tumblr, and this is a little glimpse of the ways I mediate my identity online, just a little. There's a lot more. And all of these instances of Tricia Wong, none of them are my digital self or online self or second self. It's just different for sets of me. Now, I continue to do all this because it's something I've always done since I was a teen. But I do this because I've always gravitated towards spaces that allow me to explore my identity. And it also just happens to be how other youth who are growing up on the internet, how they're exploring their identity. In the same way that my small suburban town was very culturally and socially restrictive for me, so is Facebook for many people, especially young people. Now, my research finds that youth who have come of age on the internet don't even put a meaningful distinction between online or offline. It's like they don't see their online self as like their second self. Youth actually adjust their behavior depending on who they're interacting with, not where they're interacting. So we're actually looking at the wrong thing when we actually talk about this online versus offline divide. Young people look for spaces where they can engage in interactions that allow them to be elastic with their identity. To them, their identity is like a rubber band. They shape and reshape it depending on the context. Now, the elastic self is both the feeling that one's identity is malleable and the action of trying on different identities that are beyond the realm of a prescribed self. Now, a prescribed self is composed of identities that are dictated by one's existing social structural categories. So it's the stuff that you're born into, like your nationality, your ethnicity, your gender. It's a stuff that you had no choice over and did not ask for. The prescribed self emerges out of existing social ties, which creates formal modes of interactions. These are the selves we present to people we know very well, like maybe our family, our kids, our friends, or even our coworkers. Now, the elastic self, it emerges out of new ties, which creates informal modes of interaction. Now, these are the cells we present to people we don't know, to new people, maybe to people at a conference. So broadly, we can categorize social media platforms into those that are dominant in formal modes of interaction, or informal modes of interaction. Now, platforms dominant in the formal mode produce prescriptive, singular and discrete identities. Think Facebook, where we're expected to write one account with our real name, and we're supposed to add friends, meaning we already have some kind of preexisting relationship with them. But on platforms dominant in the informal mode, such as Tumblr, Twitter, many other forums, there's no concern with people creating like false identities, because all identities are within the realm of possibility. And that's why we see a wider spectrum of malleable identities emerging out of informal modes of interaction. This is where sociality veers towards exploratory, performative, and even fantastical, because people tend to socialize with people they don't know. The risks of being socially shamed are minimized in the company of strangers. Now, the elastic self flourishes in the presence of unknown people. So when youth want to express parts in themselves that they actually aren't comfortable showing to people they know, they're not going to use their given name to say whatever they want to say. They're going to experiment under anonymous identities with people they do not know. Now, I'm seeing the elastic self emerge, you know, all over the world. And it's actually emerging very intensively in countries like China that have a very mature internet culture, along with restrictive social norms around emotional expression. But it's also happening in homogeneous Western towns where if you're different from the dominant norms, you know, be it in your sexuality or way of thinking, you gravitate towards informal modes of interaction that give you social distance from people you know. Now, while the context of how the elastic self is unfolding varies across the world, there are some common practices. You know, one thing I see is that youth make really, really big efforts to keep the self that they present to known people, informal modes of interaction very separate from the self they present to an informal modes of interaction. Now, this is not a new phenomenon. In the early days of the web, people were interacting mostly under anonymous identities. I think Lori Penny talked about that yesterday with live journal. But with the proliferation of social media, it's happening much, much more. And while it may sound like really scary that young people are spending all this time online with strangers, and especially I know in the US, we have this like public moral panic around stranger danger. But I'm seeing that, you know, youth's relationship with strangers are transforming into substantive systems of emotional support. Because in the presence of strangers, individuals are more socially distant from people now, which makes them feel much more liberated to try on different identities without the pressure of committing to just one or the risk of being socially shamed. Now, while most of the media actually talks about social media platforms, you know, like Twitter or Facebook, Tumblr, all these things like lumped into one homogenous set of apps, like social media is doing this, is it doing this to our society? But it's much more accurate to talk about social media as platforms that fall in either formal or informal modes of interaction. Now, but this division is not a hard and fast thing. It's definitely not universal. And it's not static. You know, Facebook may be used in formal modes for some, but it may be used in informal modes for others, or it could be used, you know, in both ways at the same time. It all shifts depending on the context. And that's why people and products often get this kind of thing wrong and misinterpret the meaning of people's social ties, codifying it in ways that forces people into relationships that just don't reflect the fluid nature of actual relationships. Now, I see this in my work all the time with people, companies and public sector, you know, they make assumptions about how users share, you know, parts of themselves and socialize online without solid ethnographic understandings of people's actual lives online. Now, I spend a lot of time talking to organizations who use traditional market and data analytics to segment their stakeholders like sentiment analysis, semantic analysis, you know, social tracking probably sounds familiar to some of you guys in this room. Now, I talked to them about how these techniques do not capture the nuances of the elastic self. It will tell you, it will tell you how many, you know, likes your Facebook page of God, or it'll tell you how many times a word was mentioned, but it won't tell you why they liked it. And worst off, none of this will tell you about the context of their interactions and the difference between how people use Facebook versus Tumblr and other platforms. Understanding this difference is just as important, if not more than understanding which neighborhood your stakeholders live in or what country they're from, or sometimes even their gender. If you don't get that there are formal and informal modes of interaction, and you treat what people do on the internet as only one mode of expression, it leads to massive misinterpretations of what people are doing. And I see this a lot, especially in advertising consumer market research, two industries that I work a lot with that tend to treat people as predictable masses to operate under one mode and one identity. So how do we prevent this from happening? For one, it requires good ethnography and the craft of learning how people make meaning. And actually, if you just start observing like right now, what's happening right now online, we would see some signs of these new forms of communication, such as the rise of clever social media, take Denny's Tumblr. And the US Denny's is a chain of diners and there's nothing particularly special about the food they serve or their service is just like waffles and burgers. But after hiring a young person from the Tumblr community to run Denny's Tumblr, it's become a marketing phenomenon because of its use of a clever voice and community interaction. Or we would see the rise of collective online participation and social movements like the 99% where people are turning selfies, something that Anshah had mentioned earlier, supposedly narcissistic form of self expression, into a form of online protests that extended the offline momentum around Occupy. Or we would see the rise of reaction gifts and reaction memes, which is expression of an emotion in the form of images and animations that illustrate one's emotions. So this means like if you're having a bad day, you don't actually go online and say, oh my God, I'm having a bad day, you would post a reaction gift to express sadness or anger or feeling overwhelmed. Feel overwhelmed? Okay. And we're also seeing the emergence of people expressing full phrases and ideas and the tags themselves. So here's an example, the text in this Tumblr post reads, holy shit, October next month, I need to get my cosplays done, holy shit. Now, what's more interesting is if you look at the tags, this is the tags which read tag, why do I procrastinate so damn much? Tag, now I have to make a Matt Smith cosplay and a Chihiro cosplay in less than two months tag challenge unwillingly accepted tag long tags. So that's four tags for just 29 words. The tag is longer than the text post. So this is not tagging as a form of taxonomy or to increase your SEO. This is tagging as a form of self expression. Now, these examples that I have given are all user generated behaviors, behaviors that come about because thousands and millions of strangers are collectively engaging in similar practices without any centralized plan. So these forms of communication are resonating with people because it taps into some aspect of their elastic selves. Now, this elastic self may seem like really foreign to you because you may be like, oh, that's just something young people do, I don't do any of that, you know. But this is something that we all do. We all search, have searched and continue to search for spaces where we can feel more free to explore a range of identities. We do this when we go online and erase our web browsing history. We do this when we install ad blocking extensions on our web browsers. We do this when we become excited to try a new app that allows us to experiment with a little bit of risk like, you know, Snapchat. We do this when we create accounts with anonymous profiles. And we do this because there are just simply some things that we don't want the people we know to see. Whether you actually act on the desire to meet new people or maybe just even fantasize sometimes about going to a place where no one would know you, we all engage in some levels of informal modes of interaction. But platforms that host informal modes of interaction are in danger, advertising overkill, to adult anxiety over youth hanging out with strangers, to social media networks implementing real name policy, you know, something Kate Milner talked about yesterday in her session, and a surveillance state which is unspoken chilling effects on all forms of speech. All of these factors put informal modes of interaction at risk. If there's one thing I want you to take away from this talk today is that talking to strangers is an important part of the way we socialize. From the earliest modern cities in the industrial era to the earliest web forms, strangers have been a fundamental part of the creative practices that emerge where you just throw a bunch of people who have no prescriptive ties, no blood ties, you know, no village ties to each other in one space. Now this is not to say that like bad things don't happen in anonymous interactions, you know, we learn this very well from yesterday's session on online harassment. But at the same time, it's just as important to understand how anonymity works in ways that minimizes the risks for people to interact with strangers so that they can just express parts of themselves and connect with someone who maybe makes them feel like they belong or maybe just acknowledges their existence. But none of this can happen without informal modes of interaction. If our entire world looked like formal modes of interaction like, you know, what Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt would want to do with Facebook and Google Plus, then everything, everything we do would be trackable, searchable and traceable. Sites like Reddit, Tumblr, Weibo, and thousands of message boards would just disappear. So informal modes of interaction are how new friendships are made. It's how the burdens of caring secrets are released. And it's how we process emotions such as, you know, pain or sadness and joy. And ultimately it's how we make sense of ourselves. Thank you. Thank you.