

One self is not enough - jessepollak
http://jessepollak.me/2012/06/20/one-self-is-not-enough/

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citricsquid
I think the main problem with using Facebook comments is not so much that they
assume you have one identity, it's that they don't allow you to isolate things
between websites.

I comment on a lot of websites, the internet is my home, I don't mind people
reading my comments on another website, if my parents saw my hackernews
comments it wouldn't be of concern to me, however if all my hackernews
comments were pushed to my Facebook feed and every friend on Facebook saw
every comment I leave that would be a problem because it means I would have to
consider them as an audience too when commenting.

Context is important, most people on Hackernews have the same background
(technology) and will approach the comments others write in a similar frame of
mind, however my parents would understand what I say in a different way and it
would mean I'd have to consider the meaning of my comments to _everyone_ , it
would change the dynamic. I think it's more about context than it is
"personality" or having multiple personalities. In some ways they're the same
thing though.

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mindstab
4Chan's Chris Poole/Moot nailed this last year with his talk about the
prismatic nature of identity.

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/4chans_chris_poole_face...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/4chans_chris_poole_facebook_google_are_doing_it_wr.php)

~~~
moot
Here's the talk that's from: <http://youtu.be/e3Zs74IH0mc>

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lukasb
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
identity that we sometimes modify out of weakness of character. Nonsense. Our
identities emerge out of interactions (the linked essay makes the same point
without sounding like an undergrad who just read some critical theory.)

The unfortunate thing for Facebook (and Google+) is that no one has made a
successful feature set around different friend groups in the same service.
Facebook might have to resign itself to being people's public face.

~~~
jessepollak
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.

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

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FoxenFleet
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 being their "true" selves, even if they're
passionate about the topic of a site or forum.

I'm one who likes to remain fairly private, and wouldn't want many of my
Facebook friends to even know about a blog I may have, the type of Youtube
videos I watch, or know of my Reddit account. Maybe I'm just old fashioned or
self conscious, but I try to limit what people know about me.

~~~
andrewaylett
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.

~~~
LiveTheDream
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.

~~~
waqf
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."

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Zarkonnen
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.

~~~
incongruity
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.

------
pauljburke
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.

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ken
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.

~~~
k-mcgrady
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.

~~~
ed209
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.

------
gioele
Reminded me of Mark Pilgrim's One: «My attempts at compartmentalization have
failed. There is only one inbox.»

[http://web.archive.org/web/20110514112041/http://diveintomar...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110514112041/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/03/29/aka)

------
aangjie
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.

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

~~~
gioele
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.

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scott_meade
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.

~~~
prodigal_erik
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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AznHisoka
1 self is too much!

The personality and egO that likes to joke on fb, the personality that likes
to talk stArtups.. They are not really you... Eckhart Tolle would say..

