Living through the days of social internet changes, puzzles your own ego sometimes. A very fruitful and delicate debate, and was the main topic as web2.0 summit last month, has arisen amongst both internet intellectuals and ordinary folks like me. Who am I in the different representations of my daily life online? Split personality issues arise daily, given that you mashup professional feeds with family and truely private spheres.
Obviously I would love to have the simplicity of a seamless integration of services and spaces online without having to fill in forms from hell. Hence the rise of Facebook Connect, Twitter and Google alike mixes. They have different approaches to the problem from both technical and privacy/integrity stand-point. Facebook and Google+ stress authentic personas to clean out any internet-trolls diluting the conversation, whereas Twitter have more open strategy with psedonymn spaces. I do need both, as do we all.
It becomes even more relevant for people living under stressful and threatning environments of change or weird power relations to become a internet-handle rather than the exact person you are. In his recent book Evgeny Morozov, The Dark Side of Internet Freedom strikes against the utopian internet change perspectives. Which is really a good read, but then he sadly becomes one of these trolls in the furious debate with Jeff Jarvis and his recent book Public Parts.
But still the opportunities with identity2.0 needs to be amended, as from my personal reflection being researcher, practitioner, family father and so on. I use Google stuff to run my small business, but want that to work in tandem with my public google profile on G+. Happily I am not a well known name, and have not been struck by either Facerape or the like. The well known author Salman Rushdie used his social means to take-back his persona on Facebook, and I think this is only a fraction of all the issues and pains we are going to see going forward.
The social construct of personality is not easy, and have been heavily researched from many perspectives, and in the days of status updates reveiling our ‘best selfs’ reflections one do get The Picture of Dorian Gray in mind 😉
Your digital trails and profiles, is big bucks, no doubt about it. A marketers wet dream! Integrity, privacy and openess to conversations in different spaces will be one of our hardest nuts to crack, but I think the community online will tailor this a long the road. Blend the utopian and reality-check messages and raise your voice in the places your voice matters. Do not get overun by either market or govermental policies, it is time to act for your future and your kids. We design this together!
Emergent Meccano 
The tiρs iѕ very interesting.