The identity 2.0 conundrum

A bunch of us were debating over Twitter yesterday whether it's desirable to have separate personal and professional identities on the service. The consensus seemed to be: "it depends." It depends on your professional situation. It depends on how personal and workplace-safe you want your posts. And so forth.

I find this whole question of what I call "identity 2.0" fascinating. Increasingly, there's a blurring line between personal and professional identities--and even between multiple compartments within those buckets.

As Wendell comments in a post: "It's kinda like living in a small town again." There are a lot of analogs. Just as locality and small size break down barriers between public and private in a small town or village, so, too, do the Internet and the search engine.

This is a trend that we're all going to be wrestling with for years to come. Although things I've written back in my college days are readily available online, if you know where to look, it was mostly stuff written for newspapers or Usenet posts.

There are doubtless matters on which I've changed my thinking, but there is probably nothing that I'd find especially embarrassing. What I don't have online--because it didn't exist back then--is "off the record" commentary written purely for a circle of friends. (In Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky describes how many blogs are clearly written for a close circle of friends, even though they can potentially be viewed by anyone.)

Wall Street may not be Main Street. Neither are Silicon Valley and its relatives (Research Triangle Park of North Carolina; Cambridge, Mass.; Austin, Texas, etc.). The general sort of "live and let live" attitude toward activity outside of the workplace that may predominate there--as well as among employees who are highly visible bloggers, pundits, and so forth--isn't really the norm.

Suggestions that we do something about the "ephemerality of the Web" would also, to a certain degree, exacerbate any issues. Old Web sites, comment threads, discussion boards, and so forth do tend to evaporate over time, providing a loose statute of limitations. The better we get at preserving the Web for the sake of history, the less likely that youthful indiscretions will vanish into the mists of time.

Of course, much of the Web's most vacuous inanity--think comments on Digg--is cloaked in effective anonymity. (By "effective," I mean that it can often be pierced by legal action, but is anonymous from the perspective of ordinary searches.) Transient anonymity has its own problems. However, a blogging pseudonym--perhaps known to friends--is doubtless a reasonable response in many circumstances.

I touched on some of these issues, as well as others related to data portability, previously here.

What do you think? Do you keep your personal and professional identities separate?

[fjvwing]

Well, I certainly have two identities: a personal one, and an 'adult' one. I use the personal one for work matters too, but now I am indeed wondering if the same googleable identity that I comment about social technology should be the same as the one that I whine in someone else's journal about McCain being boring. Will that make me more employable? Less? Should I now create three identities?

Like having to carry pagers and blackberries, this is another case of 'work' using technology to intrude on our downtime. Now I need to wonder what my (future) employer might think about my politics or which interiors I hate on ApartmentTherapy. I decided against splitting personal and work up; there is only so much compartmentalization we can ask people to do. XKCD got that right: http://xkcd.com/137/

FJ!!
http://www.techsociotech.com

[ghaff]

Good cartoon.

My personal take is that if you only post reasoned (and at least vaguely mainstream) commentary under your "True Name" there's probably not a whole lot to worry about. And the corner cases probably aren't worrying about either--would you want to work for the person?

But I can imagine lots of things that I might have written in my teens and twenties had there been twitter etc. that I wouldn't want permanently linked to my Web identity. And I can imagine lots of people with personal lives that they want their management to know little, if anything, about.

[Shankland]

I have separate work and personal e-mail addresses, but all my social networking stuff is dual-identity. Generally that means I assume everything is public, and I avoid using any of them for personal things. I suppress sharing my Facebook contact list with professional contacts, but most sites don't offer that level of permissions granularity.

[Doug_Harr]

I keep a blog on the Ingres site here: http://blogs.ingres.com/dougharr/
Actually I include personal blog entries regarding music news and concerts as I am an avid music aficionado, with the intention that this mixes it up a bit to provide business and entertainment opinions. I keep all professional contacts in LinkedIn. I had intended to keep facebook more personal, but find that colleagues 'friend' me such that I can't consider all contacts to be personal there. Great topic and agree this one is only going to get more debate - have been thinking here of how to weave social networking sites more into the fabric of the company.