My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?(blog.windsoc.co) |
My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?(blog.windsoc.co) |
My blog is mostly technical and the only place I'm even linked to the company I work for is LinkedIn.
I don't HIDE that fact that the two "personas" are connected but I try to keep a separation in place. My family and most of my friends don't care about the technical stuff and most of the people in the various OSS communities could give two shits about my kids pooping in the potty.
Shit, I've even got two about.me profiles.
So, for work friends, I'd make (or join) a social network called WorkBuddies, and I'd have a different one for each context. But you'd take your identity with you, and you'd own your own canonical social graph independent of the people in each network.
I think the author has a point, but I think it should be up to the user to be able to "subscribe" to different identities rather than having to choose which one you will post under. I think stuff like tags and categories will help with this. Until then, I'll just keep making noise, I think if it's signal to someone, it's worth it.
The problem is having lots of different, separate audiences, each across several different sites. I'm a composer wanting to grow an audience for my music, a professional software developer wanting to develop my day-job career, a 3D engine developer wanting to write up my realtime rendering research and correspond with other graphics programmers, an indie game developer wanting to cultivate a following for my game, a paraglider wanting to communicate constantly with other paragliders about weather and flying opportunities, and finally a regular guy wanting to keep up with friends and family about more ordinary things.
Each of those subjects has a separate audience that hardly overlaps with the others. The worst part is that most of those things could use a Twitter account for daily updates and engagement, a blog for more detailed write-ups, and a YouTube channel for video or music. The music probably wants a SoundCloud account. Some of those things want separate email accounts. Some want dedicated web sites.
Having a properly rounded web presence seems like a nightmare of account management. I imagine keeping a spreadsheet with a huge matrix of login info. It's possible to do it - it just seems daunting and hard to manage effectively.
The biggest problem with running multiple accounts is a UI issue. Many services (such as Facebook) assume you will have only identity and make it difficult to switch between accounts because they save some state (setting a cookie). But one can use separate browsers or install a browser extension that makes it easy to switch sessions. And many third-party apps (such as Hootsuite) recognize users are likely to have multiple accounts. Heck, the latest version of the Twitter native client allows multiple accounts and even Google is making it easier to set up and switch among multiple accounts.
We just need more developers recognizing that we have multifaceted personalities and accommodating multiple personas for our presence online. No harm in that.
I tried with one twitter account per language and doing groups in facebook, but it was too time consuming. Now I mix both languages with care and some won't like it, but I can't go further.
I built up quite a reputation under this nick, but perhaps not enough in the right direction.
Now I find myself going back to the drawing board and building a reputation in my own name.
This also inevitably leads to the dual identity as I struggle to leave the alias behind...
I was working on a site like twitter but with much more anonymous features and hierarchal posting interactions, and security features, largely motivated by both the iranian election and arab spring, but I got sidetracked and bored of the project pretty quickly, ultimately realizing that there's not really an elegant all-encompassing solution to the situation.
Why would the internet be any different? If you want to mass communicate, you're going to have to sort your people into categories and communicate with them according to that.
Because that's what it comes down to. Mass communication.
This is a problem that is more easily managed in "real life" by the obvious limitations of presence.
I really don't see the issue, and I think that's why nobody has done anything about it.
I only have one Facebook profile but I certainly know others with more than one. I do, on the other hand, have two Flickr photostreams for very different categories of work.
OK, the websites only cache one login via their cocokies, but that's a solvable problem. I use Firefox for one profile and Chrome for the other, works well enough for me...
Flip the coin.
You can be more interesting by providing information or point of view that isn't expected. Embrace your broadness and don't siphon yourself off into well defined silos.
I look at it this way: If somebody I know avoids talking to me about that things that bore me -- say, pro football or New York Times bestsellers -- I wouldn't see that as a lack of boldness or a species of dishonesty; I would see that as a form of consideration for my time.
But beyond that, I think it's also a problem of expectations mismatch: on an app level social media is about siloing information by person (or possibly by company), but the user expectation is often that they've siloed information by subject matter.
It's a burden most acutely felt by so-called renaissance men and women (which I'd wager are an over-represented group here in the HN community). There's discrimination towards people that talk about/do seemingly unrelated things, that I think Wolfrom is alluding to. People tend to confuse specialization with expertise, e.g. that a software developer that also does visual design and has an interest in making music, for example, isn't as much of an "expert" as someone focused exclusively on code. Unfortunately not separating your content can have an impact on your credibility.
I wish I could have just one identity, that is me-facing, but many accounts, that are audience-facing. I wish I could log into YouTube as Andy Wood, and manage all my accounts (3D graphics demos, domino toppling, paragliding, etc).
In fact, WordPress.com works just like this, and I love it. Google, YouTube, and Twitter, by contrast, seem borderline resistant to this type of usage - meaning they all force me to keep creating new email accounts in addition to the multiple service accounts, even when I really don't want another email account.
Now you can have as many email addresses as you want without needing to create them one by one. And if you work it a little more you can even answer as any of them and apply filters.
Most sites just don't support multiple logins.
Your approach sounds interesting, and it corresponds well with how you take on different personalities in different settings in real life.
Do you know of that is what Diaspora is trying to do?
I think the problem with that is that it creates weirdly asynchronous or non-cohesive groups. I.e. if I have a list called work friends, it's not necessarily the same as your list called work friends, and the stuff I share to my list doesn't go to the same set of people.
In the "Places" paradigm, the groups would be more canonical and autonomous and transparent to the people in the group.
It's true that a places metaphor is a bit less granular, but I think it makes it easier to understand how things are being shared than a bunch of one to many connections that overlap to varying degrees.
Also, there's no reason you couldn't have both, since the places metaphor is really in practice just a subset of everyone having individual group lists.