The Challenges of Recommending Digital Selves in Physical Spaces

Abstract:

There are a number of online systems where people can, in effect, recommend themselves, or more precisely, represent themselves in ways that may motivate others to seek them out for conversations, business ventures, dates and a variety of other types of interactions and relationships. Several of these systems offer capabilities for people to create profiles of themselves and algorithms for matching profiles to recommend one person to another. When a group of people is gathered together in a physical space, for the purpose of renewing connections or creating new ones, new challenges emerge with respect to which dimensions of people’s online representations to inject into that space – how, where and when to recommend whom to whom. This paper briefly describes some experiences and ongoing challenges encountered in determining how best to bridge the gaps between people by bridging the gaps between people’s online representations of themselves and their presence in physical space.