This article on Mashable, Why Mainstream Social Networks Complicate Our Identities [OPINION], made me think about how I used to want to divorce the poetic, creative me, from my work self, from my family me, because the way I am with different groups conflicts with the way those people see me.
In the article, the author said:
How Google+ Makes Social Networking More Confusing
The Google+ approach aims to simplify managing relationships, but ultimately fails because it works against people’s natural behavioral patterns. This is why Google+ faces an uphill challenge to adoption. Google+ allows users to define their own “circles” of contacts, like “High School Classmates,” “Family” or “Classic Car Fans.” The platform seeks to merge distinct interaction groups together into a unified experience. Users spend time creating the circles they want to share with, a tactic that helps push information into your contacts’ streams.
But the system breaks down once you try to consume content from a variety of different sources in your own stream. Suddenly, college roommates are mixed in with professional contacts, or people you’ve never actually met. This requires additional cognitive effort of the user to filter content by relationship, rendering the experience frustrating and confusing.
To which my response was:
Some good insights. On G+ though, it seems like a fixable problem as far as consuming content. They’d just have to give the option of letting the user pick – and be able to change – a default circle to view.
If you’re not familiar with Google+, the way you organize your friends into Circles helps you both discover and publish content just to those sub-groups of people.
The author also said:
For instance, you are not the same person at work as you are among friends on a Friday night. The things you talk about, the vocabulary you use and the friendships you maintain in different contexts are the products of years of learning how to interpret relationships cues. From flirting to non-verbal communication, the way we present ourselves to others is constantly shifting based on whom we are talking to, and why.
To which my response was:
Personally, I don’t feel like my identity is complicated by these networks anymore – all of this prefaced by the fact that I’m at the tail end of the early adopter group.
I did, in the beginning, want to present one self to my family, and one to my coworkers/business partners, and yet another to customers (wouldn’t want my political beliefs or philosophies of life to get in the way of a sale.)
But over time I learned that 2 things solved this – the me at the center of the Venn Diagram of all my various identities is who rules my profiles. I go into each deeper me by choosing the conversations I want to have, and applying a level of privacy to where I have them.
I continued to think about this. Maybe I’m just an exception to this rule, but most of the people I would call my friends, I meet in some professional context. So many of my friends are peers and pals, to varying degrees. So Facebook is where I have friends and peers and fans. I know I’m not the only one because many of my friends are in the same boat.
Of course, there are parts of me that I keep separate, but not due to identity issues, but out of respect for the privacy of others (my younger sister and her husband don’t want their kids photos freely distributed on the web), or respect for their role in my life.
For example, I write very personal poetry that I was afraid my mother would see at the time and it would upset her (poetry coping with childhood sexual abuse or depression. Plus who wants to read their daughter’s erotica? ew.)
Part of me thinks that the tools are going to mature to address our issues with our identities, and mainstream society is going to get to the place early adopters already are, in thinking that we don’t really need to worry about hiding the many faces of ourselves, but in sorting and funneling what each facet produces to the proper group.
Then, I began to think 3 things.
- There’s really only one me, with many sides.
- Technology hasn’t caught up with the true notion of identity yet. Google or Facebook or Diaspora or whoever is eventually going to figure out that we need a more flexible profile, one we can set as default, and several others that we can tie to how we know a person. So if I put someone in Google+ in my Friend circle, whatever is in my sub-identity for Friends is the version of my profile that will appear to that friends.
- Most of my family doesn’t care about my work or creative life at the level of detail that I think. My mother cares that I am a poet, and she’s proud of me for that. But she’s not going to read anything I don’t bring to her.