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. With Express yourself … or whoever
Posted Under: "Social" studies,America,Appearances,Meta-Brand News,Murketing,The People's Marketing
One of my favorite topics is the flipside of the supposed confessional, privacy-indifferent nature of Web expression: The amount of Web expression that is not only un-confessional, it’s somewhere between self-marketing and flat-out lying. So this story in today’s WSJ about people who crib from the profiles of others on social networking or dating sites made my day:
Online daters feel pressure to stand out and believe they must sell themselves like a product, say researchers at Georgetown, Rutgers and Michigan State universities who are conducting a joint study of them. “You are not making money off of somebody else’s work; you’re just trying to market yourself,” says self-confessed copier Jeff Picazio, a 40-year-old computer-systems manager in Boynton Beach, Fla.
Businesses have even cropped up to sell people elemements of a marketable personality. One, the WSJ says, “offers 12 ‘proven’ profiles for $4. Sample: ‘There is a shallowness, a fakeness to much of the “‘singles scene.”‘”
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Kim Fellner's book 
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Reader Comments
A female friend of mine once saw that a fellow she dated had, after they no longer saw each other, cribbed her entire profile, adjusted for gender. She called him to object and he maintained that he did not see anything untoward about it, but that it showed how much he esteemed her.
That said, I occasionally online date and I can attest to the astounding lack of creativity and posturing (not mine, of course!) in online ads. For a while, it seemed to me that the only books men in my age group ever read were by Chuck Palahniuk. And they all wanted ‘partners in crime’ though they never specified if they wanted to commit felonies or misdemeanors.