image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dollobserver

Meet Tweetin’ Timmy. He’s Chatty Kathy’s oddball cousin. Kathy spends hours on the phone talking to her friends about the best way to shed the weight she’s gained attending too many dinner parties. Timmy, on the other hand, simply gives you hourly Twitter updates about his mood and wants you all to know that he just hates the buildup on the lid of his bottle of dish soap. After all, he spent the day doing chores and recovering from the party you took him to last night where he didn’t look any of your friends in the eye.

It has been said a million times before, so it only deserves one sentence: As digital communication becomes pervasive, people are cultivating their personalities online. What’s worth asking, though, is what good is that when your online and IRL (that’s “in real life” for the noobs) selves are total opposites?

Most of us who use Twitter have a person or three in our list of followers who loves to share the most mundane and obscure details of life. It’s easy to draw assumptions about their personalities, but sometimes the peeps don’t sync up with their Tweets. People who seem cold in daily interactions might surprise you by sharing it all on the Internet.

This new personality, Tweetin’ Timmy, reflects the fact that social media are creating the newly attention-hungry in addition to serving the gossip-prone. A new generation of the digitally sociable are more comfortable online than IRL.

As we spend more time in the digital dimension, our online personas become more valid — if you’re a person who spends a lot of time on the internet, there’s no discounting how you act on the internet. The catch-22 of this is that now, online personas can be less of a glimpse into who you might meet on that job interview or first date.

Perhaps a new part of personality has emerged. Is how well digital- and carbon-based activities match up an important new criterion for how people will be judged?

Nate Rogers