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One self is not enough

jessepollak.me

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Re: One self is not enough

#21

Post by ed209 »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #18
ken wrote: 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.

problem here is that when I post publicly for the benefit of subscribers, my friends and family also get that stuff - and they are totally not interested in it.

Re: One self is not enough

#23

Post by andrewaylett »

FoxenFleet wrote: post #6

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…

The problem with Google's circles is they only restrict: if I write about tech stuff, I have no problem with anyone reading it, but I know that my family probably won't want to.

Re: One self is not enough

#24

Post by margold »

Zarkonnen wrote: post #12

See also "The Social Graph is Neither" by Maciej Cegłowski. http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/ And yeah, I have two Twitter accounts: one for friends and one for business.

Nice article, thanks. I find the idea that merely describing your social connections influences/changes them to be pretty insightful, so is calling the current situation a "social version of the Uncanny Valley". His advice of waiting for the current internet landscape to organically start changing into the right direction is one way to look at it, but I do not want to wait this long. There must be a less crippled way of bringing your social life online.

Re: One self is not enough

#25

Post by LiveTheDream »

andrewaylett wrote: post #23
FoxenFleet wrote: post #6

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…

The problem with Google's circles is they only restrict: if I write about tech stuff, I have no problem with anyone reading it, but I know that my family probably won't want to.

This sounds like a use case that does work for Circles. If you post about tech stuff, make it visible to your tech circle and not to your family circle.

Re: One self is not enough

#26

Post by incongruity »

Zarkonnen wrote: post #12

See also "The Social Graph is Neither" by Maciej Cegłowski. http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/ And yeah, I have two Twitter accounts: one for friends and one for business.

Good reference.

Here's another few I'd found previously on the topic of faceted identities; There's been a bit of research on this topic in the social sciences for a while now, for whatever it's worth, but here are some papers that I found insightful:

Danah Boyd's undergraduate thesis (Danah is now a Sr. Researcher at Microsoft):

http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/danah/thesis/danahThesis.pdf

A more recent paper from Yahoo: http://research.yahoo.net/files/pr308-farnham-1.pdf

And this much older paper makes it clear that the idea of personal identity being multifaceted is all but a given in many lines of research, pointing back to influential papers as old as 1968: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/965/hoggterrywhite.pdf

So, honestly, I've always been a little surprised that supposedly smart companies/developers at some of the hottest tech companies (FB & Google, for example) would build business models/big plans around such a simple model of social identity when it's so at odds with the way people really work.

Re: One self is not enough

#27

Post by waqf »

LiveTheDream wrote: post #25
andrewaylett wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Google's circles is they only restrict: if I write about tech stuff, I have no problem with anyone reading it, but I know that my family probably won't want to.

This sounds like a use case that does work for Circles. If you post about tech stuff, make it visible to your tech circle and not to your family circle.

But he wants his posts to be available to anyone who (unbeknownst perhaps to him) might be interested in tech. The setting should be something like "Public, but only spam my tech circles."

Re: One self is not enough

#28

Post by prodigal_erik »

scott_meade wrote: post #7

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.

Ours is a nosy, judgmental species. Unless you can rely on being self-employed on your own farm for the rest of your life, you are someday (while you're seeking a job or an apartment or a partner) going to have cause to regret having put your True Name on a controversial idea. This is why HN gets substance while Facebook gets cheerful pablum from me, and I'm undecided about Google+.
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