Emma Brooks | Digital Media Enthusiast

I’ve been on Formspring for about 9 months now. Partially because I was curious as to what its role would be on the web and wanted to tinker around with it, and partially because I wanted to know what people would ask me if given the chance to, anonymously.

I’ve answered over 180 questions which is… shocking and a little shaming. Ha. The majority of them are your standard questions most have come across in a typical internet meme. You know the kind, the “25 Things About You” kind. There have been some odd ones, and some funny ones, and some dirty ones. There have been questions I haven’t published; ones I wouldn’t dare answer. Some have been spam. Some have been hurtful.

All in all, I would say I have yet to decide how I feel about my experience with Formspring. The spiteful/sexual/spam comments have generally canceled out any fun or interesting comments I’ve received. Which seems to be par for the course with this site.

A few months ago, a co-worker of mine passed along an interesting article from the New York Times, titled “Teenage Insults, Scrawled on Web, Not on Walls,” discussing Formspring and teens using it to bully peers. Upsetting, to say the least. And very interesting. A quote from the article:

“Nice stuff is not why you get it,” said Ariane Barrie-Stern, a freshman at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in New York City. “I think it’s interesting to find out what people really think that they don’t have the guts to say to you. If it’s hurtful, you have to remind yourself that it doesn’t really mean anything.”

Ariane, who has more than 100 posts on her site, said she had not been terribly bothered by anything she has read so far, but she acknowledged that after one comment about a certain pair of leggings, she stopped wearing them.

I find it highly fascinating that teens would allow for this kind of internet bullying. However, a recent article from danah boyd | apophenia titled “Digital Self Harm and the Other Acts of Self-Harassment” has revealved something quite interesting: According to Sarahjane Sacchetti (Director of Communications at formspring.me), a number of teens are posting these hurtful questions to themselves. As quoted from the article:

In other words, there are teens out there who are self-harassing by “anonymously” writing mean questions to themselves and then publicly answering them.

So why is this happening? Danah has three theories:

• It’s a cry for help.
• They want to look cool.
• They’re trying to trigger compliments.

While I know some of the commenters didn’t agree with Danah’s use of the word “self-harm” to describe this phenomenon, I do think the reasons remain valid.

Thinking back to my teenage years, there were some very unhappy moments where I contemplated lashing out in some way, in order to get attention, any kind of attention. But back then, we didn’t have Facebook drama, or anonymous Q&A sites to allow for this kind of release. It seems that for many teens, Formspring offers yet another outlet for teens who are trying to figure themselves out in an increasingly digital world.

So what does a Digital Strategist do?

I’ve been asked this question, or variations of it, so many times in my short career of being one it is laughable. Laughable because even after almost a year in my new role at Publicis Modem, I’m still unsure how to really answer it.

At first I thought it was just me.

Maybe I was dumb.

Maybe it was because I wasn’t given a piece of paper with a check-list of my responsibilities when I got promoted.

Maybe I just didn’t “get” it.

Maybe I needed a sit down talking-to from someone senior explaining it.

Yes, I admit, I googled. Seriously. I googled my own job title to find out what it meant. And a funny thing happened… I couldn’t really find a concrete answer. It seemed like no one actually knew what a Digital Strategist does. Even Digital Strategists themselves.

And then, (I can’t for the life of me find it online right now but) I came across a document. A document that contained answers cultivated by someone who asked hundreds – if not thousands – of Digital Strategists, “Can you explain to me what you do?” The document was pages and pages long, filled with answers. Answers of every nature. Some long; some short. All different. I scrolled down and down, further down, and finally gave up after about 500 responses (there were many more to go).

Not one concise way to explain it.

So when my friend Jon Crowley, posted on his blog, Attention Industry, this afternoon, his thoughts on what a Digital Strategist does, I eagerly read it. And I think he may have nailed at least a core part of it:

I essentially have the same job as my father. He’s a transportation planner, and I work in digital strategy.

You can read the rest of this article, titled “Digital Strategy is Transportation Planning” here.

Thanks, Jon, for being ever-bright.