talking about your tv, movie and music tastes

Way back in January, there was a funny article about Friendster in Esquire magazine and about what people think is interesting about themselves. Here's an excerpt:

"In real life, people wouldn't want to go to a party where everyone was desperate," says Jonathan Abrams, the thirty-three-year-old Canadian egomaniac who created Friendster. "They want to meet people through people they already know. I wanted to create a way for people to meet over the Internet that was more like real life."
Abrams's suggestion that meeting on Friendster is "like real life" is remarkably accurate, inasmuch as the people you encounter online are lying. Or at least they're lying about the things they seem to find unimportant, such as their appearance, their interests, and their relationship status. (Unless Friendster is reflecting something about society I'm missing, it seems unlikely that 30 percent of the U. S. populace would classify themselves as part of an "open marriage.") Yet weirdly, there are some elements of the Friendster personal profile that no one seems to lie about, most notably what TV shows they like. Friendsters seem totally comfortable with strangers assuming they cheat on their wives and sketch portraits of unicorns in their free time, but they don't want anyone to think they watch According to Jim unironically. This is similar to how a person will have oral sex with you on your very first date but won't let you look inside her glove compartment at the moment because it contains a Tori Amos cassette. True signposts of self-identity—especially for anyone born after 1970—tend to be the most trivial things we adore, which is why Friendster is so popular. It allows us to build two-dimensional personalities in which we can eradicate the things that matter to others (our looks, our sincerity, our intelligence, et cetera) while accentuating the things that matter only to us (whether or not we can quote Glengarry Glen Ross , whether or not we can communicate telepathically with our cat, whether or not we want to pretend that we read Finnegans Wake , et cetera). Our entire corporeality is dictated by what we think is interesting about ourselves. "

- nyanko