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One self is not enough

jessepollak.me

11–20 of 29 posts

Re: One self is not enough

#11
post #2

I brought this up with a couple Facebook PMs last week; they seemed nonplussed. One of them brought up the fact that the average user has fewer than 150 friends; he gently suggested that I was an edge case. I disagree, even someone with 10 friends will show one face to five and another face to the other five (if those five are a separate group.) Zuckerberg's comments about "integrity" suppose that we have an atomic i…

I don't know if Facebook will be people's public faces. At least for me, it's a much more private thing than Twitter and I'm much more comfortable posting personal content on it. Is that not the same for you? Also, I think Google tried to tackle this issue with Google Plus, but they were just too late to the game. Maybe if they'd come earlier, it really could have been a successful solution to this problem.

Yes, most everyone I know delineates between the services this way. Twitter - public. Facebook - friends. Linkedin - managing recruiters.

Re: One self is not enough

#13

One online self per service is enough. I can't recall a recent situation where I felt I was acting differently in public depending on who was around. Certainly not differently enough that when I'm sitting at my computer I'm going to try to recall which persona I want to wear at which time. Perhaps I don't get out enough.

It's not as extreme as that--consider just the case where you want to share things with work friends that might not appeal to college friends. You're not acting different; you'd show the college friends if any of them asked, but you know they're bored by it so you want to keep it out of the timeline/tweets/whatev that they see.

Re: One self is not enough

#14
I like the prism metaphor. It resonates with both concepts of multiple facets and filtering light differently through each. My first thought/equivalent for light is the stuff we share/publish on the social networks. Surprisingly, nobody mentioned github as one more self/personality.

Re: One self is not enough

#15
As the article states, this isn't necessarily just an online problem (although Facebook brings it into sharp focus I guess). Each group of people I know meet essentially a slightly (sometimes very) different person because the interests and hobbies I share with those people is a small fraction of who I am (I always assumed it was the same for everyone). At my stag do I had relatives, work colleagues, online gaming friends, my jui jitsu friends and university study friends all meeting up for the first time trying to figure out why on earth I'd spend time with these other people that were so different from them. Of course once they started actually having a decent conversation a certain amount of commonality was found (there seemed to be a large number of arrogant sarcastic know it alls for some reason) but while they kept interactions at a superficial level (like a lot of online communication I suppose) there seemed to be very little common ground.

Re: One self is not enough

#16

Here I was hoping that someone had a crazy idea for a new OOP paradigm....

Same here: I thought somebody proposed the use of different _self_ objects in Ruby procs to differentiate between the original containing object and the calling containing object.

Re: One self is not enough

#18
post #4

All of the (moderately) famous people I know on Facebook have (at least) two Facebook accounts: their public / fan identity, and their private / friend identity. I think it's officially against the rules, but even when they obviously use the same name, and presumably log in from the same IP address, Facebook doesn't seem to care.

It's not against the rules. You can have a profile (private) and page (public). They recently tried to solve this inconvenience with the subscriber model. People can subscribe to public updates on your (mostly) private profile doing away with the need for a separate 'fan' page.

Re: One self is not enough

#19
post #2

I brought this up with a couple Facebook PMs last week; they seemed nonplussed. One of them brought up the fact that the average user has fewer than 150 friends; he gently suggested that I was an edge case. I disagree, even someone with 10 friends will show one face to five and another face to the other five (if those five are a separate group.) Zuckerberg's comments about "integrity" suppose that we have an atomic i…

I disagree, even someone with 10 friends will show one face to five and another face to the other five (if those five are a separate group.)

I completely agree. I'm hardly a social person, and even I have at least five different "selfs". Family, coworkers, college friends, high school friends, random people on the Internet, I behave differently with all of those groups.

Re: One self is not enough

#20

Isn't this was Google+ "Circles" was supposed to solve? It seems even if you did have just one permanent online identity, you could choose who would see what. Which it seems would work for the author. On the other hand, for public forums and anything else that would come up in a Google search would be tied to your name as well (which I think is what Moot was getting at). It seems in the end, most people would avoid b…

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