There used to be a fairly simple rule for me. Facebook was for social social networking, and LinkedIn was for work social networking. I had realised that, whilst I tend to be a fairly open person at work, I needed to provide some sort of segmentation to my online personae if nothing else to be able to prevent photos from my more hedonistic days scuppering my increasingly middle-aged career plans.
There were some friends who made it on to my LinkedIn business contacts pages, and some colleagues who became friends and with whom I could explain why I was wearing that hat in 1996, whilst looking through the vomit-splattered photographic records of their own misspent youths.
I have found, however, that Twitter seems to be blurring the line for me. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that:
– the short message nature of Twitter means that most of what is on there (and certainly the conversations) mean little out of context. I think that, using the right language, one could have a quite private conversation without anyone else having the feintest idea what you were on about. This is a bit like the dinner party 'wink' conversation that Nicholas Negroponte talked about back in the day in Being Digital.
– the organisation that I now work for is substantially less 'formal' that the last two that I have worked in. And how nice it is to be back in the creative industries!
It took me a long while to realise that we all have a series of roles that we play as we go about our day to day business. Some jealously guard their out of work life, and I have sometimes found people in that category difficult to work with (I don't need to know your innermost thoughts, but a bit of broader context sure does help). Others wear their hearts on their sleeves, and that can also be a challenge.
Social networking in the Web 2.0 context leaves us with much of our lives rationalised down into text and pictures. These vignettes are of themselves only vague representations of 'real' world aspects of our lives. Will we all need to be a bit Max Clifford about managing our online personae going forward?
mmitII 