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?
I assume that Mark Cuban is deliberately being contentious about peer-to-peer networking in his An Open Letter to Comcast and Every cable/Telco on P2P when he writes:
"BLOCK P2P TRAFFIC, PLEASE"
I'm not going to get into the political and other considerations here, but he has an economic and technical basis for his argument.
In September, I attended Technology Review's EmTech07 Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT. I've written previously about some of my general takes. However, one of the panels that I attended, "P2P: The Future of Networking?" is germane to the question at hand. The panelists were Klaus Mochalski, CEO, Ipoque (does P2P traffic management and analysis); Roger Dingledine, President and Cofounder, The Tor Project (an online anonymity project based on P2P); and Robert Morris, Associate Professor of Computer Science at MIT (helped develop Roofnet and Chord/DHash). Without delving further into the background of the panelists, suffice it to say that all have been involved with P2P networks from the technical side. None were coming at P2P from a content provider perspective--which tends to be anti-P2P given that these networks are often used to pirate copyrighted material. Again, not today's discussion.
With that as preamble, I found it noteworthy that none of the panelists came across as particular P2P fans.
For instance, Tor's Roger Dingledine said that "P2P is not good for anything you can do in a centralized way with the same properties." Now, to be sure, one of those things that you can't do in a centralized way and still have the same properties is anonymity as implemented by the Tor Project. Nonetheless, I think it a notable statement from someone who's clearly not a particular P2P foe. (Roger also commented that P2P/decentralization helps anonymity but it's not perfect and that anonymity for Web browsing and other small things can be achieved in other ways.)
Robert Morris discussed some of the reliability issues associated with P2P: "One way to think about this is that: 'Would you want Skype to be the only way to get 911'?" He went on to note that: "Distributed in server room vs. distributed servers around the world is a big difference because of latencies. You can get partial failures which almost doesn't happen in a centralized system. and partial failures are very hard to design for. That's one of the main limits of P2P."
Finally, Ipoque's Klaus Mochalski noted that "P2P is taking load off servers but actually adds load to the Internet backbone because you copy stuff around more often than necessary."
This last comment is really the heart of Mark's missive. P2P places more load on the aggregated systems and networks of the Internet taken as a whole than if the same content were being distributed in a centralized manner. Using P2P may make sense and, perhaps ISPs should support P2P traffic for any of a number of reasons. But efficiency can't be the argument.
Facebook banned someone for using a pseudonym and he's upset.
Anonymous speech has a long history in the United States going back to at least the Federalist Papers. And there are many good reasons, in addition to well-established case law, why anonymous speech should be protected.
That said, very little of such speech on the Internet falls into "Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views." (U.S. Supreme Court McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, 1995). Instead, anonymity on the Internet often seems far more about protecting rudeness than protecting political dissent. Thus, I have little problem with a service such as Facebook attempting to ensure that its members are using real identities. (See this post by Dennis Howlett for a largely dissenting view.)
This case does, however, raise a variety of points about identity, privacy, and closed social platforms that are worth considering given that we'll see these issues and others like them again and again.
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