
Can you forge your future self when you never leave the present? - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/magazine/15wwln-lede-t.html?ref=magazine
======
unalone
Didn't the Beatles keep their name when they changed from pop to cutting-edge
experimental songwriting? Don't we all (er, mostly all) keep our own names as
we grow up and change?

Being a singularly self-obsessed person, I've gone through several noticeable
Facebook phases. At one point I unfriended all but 40 people, to limit noise,
deleted profile information, to avoid being easily judged, and got rid of
pretty much everything from my profile. Now that filters exist (as well as for
a few other reasons), I've become much more open and expressive, friended a
bunch of people I don't actually know (including people from HN), and changed
things. I've gone through similar things with blog writing and web design.

People aren't scared about the future. Very few people censor themselves, even
knowing people are watching them. Perhaps we've developed a conscious
blindness to our numerous followers. Perhaps we just really could care less.
Either way, people aren't going to worry about their pasts for long. Even when
it's there, the attitude of people I know is, "Either they won't be damned to
look far into the past, or it's entirely unreasonable for them to judge me for
who I was three years ago - or for who I am outside of work."

That's a good attitude to have. You can determine some things by how a person
acts when they aren't watching - but not everything. I have a bunch of wise,
friendly, sweet friends who like getting wasted, and a bunch of wise,
friendly, sweet friends who go to debate championships on the weekend. I've
met introverts and extroverts that I liked. I'm friends with a few fairly
racist people and a few fairly sexist people, and each one is a good person
despite all the stuff they do, and some of them are people I'd really like in
a working environment because despite all that, they're _good workers_.
Overjudgmentalism is a character flaw, and it's one that there's going to be
rising hostility towards if companies start getting anal about things like
blogs and Facebook. Facebook won't be forgotten: those old manners of thinking
will be.

~~~
yters
If you are wrong, then anyone who does censor themselves is in for a major
competitive gain. If you are right, they haven't lost much. Facebook isn't a
very big part of life.

~~~
unalone
Depends on your definition of life.

You could argue that you can lock yourself away from people, stay in solitude,
and spend all your time learning and trying to make money, and that gives you
a competitive gain. But that ignores how important and useful friends are.

Like it or not, people today talk a lot on Facebook. I talk to people back at
my high school fairly often. I keep in touch with people I couldn't keep in
touch with otherwise. And with the various dramas and photos and notes that
appear on Facebook, I've both had some interesting experiences with people and
I've preserved memories of things that've happened offline.

Maybe I lose something by having that all online (mind you, in a place where
only 90 other people can see it, rather than in some place public), but I gain
far more. It's similar to how I'm willing to write about personal matters on
my blog. I can imagine an employee coming across my writing about a failed
relationship or about incidents about college, but I gain more from being able
to publish my thoughts candidly than I lose from their disapproval.

My line of thinking goes: if my employer is such an ass as to search through
my past to see if I've done questionable things, then either I've done a piss-
poor job of making myself into a good candidate, or he's not somebody worth my
working for. Either way, the fault is not my past: it's my, or my employer's,
present.

~~~
yters
You don't think there are any other options besides hermitage or ubiquitous
sharing of personal life and thoughts?

Anyways, obviously I'm not against others being open about themselves like you
recommend. Even if what I say is right that doesn't exclude your point about
the kind of person you want to work for. People just may not find the reticent
lifestyle is for them. However, there are people in this world who are
comfortable with keeping to themselves, and they may have more opportunities
in the future.

------
donaq
_Kids, who will inevitably want to drive a stake into the heart of former
lives, may simply abandon the service (remember Friendster?) and find
something new: something still unformed, yet to be invented — much like
themselves._

I suspect that is what will happen. Going off on a tangent, the idea comes to
me that perhaps some sort of meta-Facebook site might appear in the future
that will be to the children of today what Facebook is to the "oldsters".

We join Facebook and encounter old friends and old photographs posted by old
friends. Maybe they will join meta-Facebook and find old profiles of old
friends that link to their own old profiles.

~~~
unalone
What, out of curiosity, would prompt them to leave a service that all their
friends use? There needs to be something _so_ useful that I'll join a new site
and leave behind all my old friends. I don't see that happening with Facebook.

~~~
donaq
Hmm, like the quote says, remember Friendster? Anyway, the same things that
prompt all of us to drift apart from old friends, I should think. New friends
and social circles, different lifestyles, different jobs, different
priorities, different interests, etc. The same things happen online. I'm sure
many people have irc channels/forums/games/sites they used to visit daily and
members from that site they used to confide their deepest secrets to. I know I
have. Now they're all no longer a part of my life.

I used to visit Facebook daily too, but I've mostly stopped visiting it,
except when someone uses it to send me event invitations or someone tells me
to go view pictures there. For everything else, there's IM. The thing is, if
someone is really a friend of mine, then I don't need Facebook to stay in
touch with them. If not, then I don't need to stay in touch with them, so
sites like Facebook really had no intrinsic draw for me besides novelty or
perhaps a business opportunity.

Now my main guilty pleasure is HN, and none of my friends are here. Then
again, I am a bit of a loner, so this could just reflect my own atypical usage
patterns and you could well be right in that most people will use Facebook for
the rest of their lives. I doubt it though. I don't think Facebook addresses a
need as fundamental as Google does.

~~~
reconbot
I use facebook for showing my twitter updates (as most of my friends don't use
twitter), showing my google reader shares (as most of my friends don't have
google reader) and for event planning. The ability to easily share videos and
photos also helps greatly. My last couple of birthdays were a little different
and people took a little convincing. The hardest one was convincing people to
buy into throwies, as you're "throwing money" around the city. Facebook make
that possible without having to convince every single person myself. Once I
got a group going they were convincing each other. And yes, everyone had a lot
of fun. =)

