What I’m talking about isn’t a new problem. It actually existed before the internet, back when people were connecting to local BBS systems. However the problem is dramatically amplified by the abundance of social networks and the different functions that people use them for.
- Your Social Graph – Image via Wikipedia
Back in the BBS and early Usenet days it was common for people to use aliases rather than their real names. This habit continued with the advent of the web and to this day most people participating in web forums use an assumed name of some sort. And so it’s not surprising that with the advent of social networks, people continued to use pseudonyms.
In most cases people who use pseudonyms are not hiding their identity so much as they are enjoying the opportunity to express themselves without being limited by their real life persona and it’s a harmless enough affectation.
But Social Networks have complicated things. Now the different identities that people have on various networks are overlapping as the different services start to interlink. At best this causes confusion. But the inconvenience it causes in the personal space is relatively trivial. A far bigger problem is what happens when your personal life and your work life collide.
Many businesses and individuals have embraced social networks as a way to promote their business or expand their career opportunities. The problem is that the way you behave while messing around with your friends and the way you behave at work are completely different.
There are a lot of unwritten social norms for expected behavior. What is not only acceptable, but expected at home or in a bar is simply not tolerated at work. Normally we know if we are at work or at home and we know what is expected of us. Social networks blur that distinction.
The current solution for most people is to continue adopting pseudonyms so they can keep everything separate, but surely compartmentalizing ourselves can’t be a permanent solution. I use the same identity for all my social networking. The only variations occur when a username is already taken. But generally speaking if you see Eoghann or Eoghann Irving, it’s going to be me. I even verified my Google Buzz profile and I own the eoghann.com domain.
What we need to do I think is learn the new social norms about what is acceptable and where.
For example if you are a member of a site like LinkedIn there is clearly an expectation that you are there for business related reasons. Twitter and FourSquare are primarily personal networks that some businesses have chosen to co-opt. I will post comments on Twitter than I consider totally inappropriate for somewhere like LinkedIn.
But what about the networks that blur the lines? Brazen Careerist is a site with a clear business element, but where people interact about both business and non-business subjects. What is appropriate behavior in that sort of environment?
That’s why we also need to learn to group our contacts and control what updates they get. Facebook has a fairly sophisticated system for doing that. But it seems to confuse most people so they fail to use it properly with unpleasant consequences.
And again the situation is made worse by the multiple identities and persona’s that people have on different networks. There are so many interlinked, cross-posting networks at this point it is virtually impossible to be certain what information is being read by who.
We’ve reached a stage where we desperately need a standardized name space. Base it off email, domain names or something entirely new. I don’t care. Just give me a way to be me and to know who I am communicating with.
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