Meeting your teacher at the mall

I'm sure she meant her OTHER boss

If social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter were ever digital dorm parties, those days are long over. Everyone who knows you — your mom, your boss, the guy you were hoping would call, that pain-in-the-ass client — knows about Facebook, Twitter, and the next big thing. And when they find you on one of them they’ll expect that they’ve found the you that they know, and you’ll expect the same from them. But that’s not who you or they really are, is it?

At any given moment we perceive our social circle to be divided into segments. What divides them is usually a combination of circumstances largely beyond our control, but for the most part the divisions are organic in nature and not rigid. Who’s my colleague? Who’s my friend? Who’s family? While Facebook presents the language of social segmentation in checkboxes, implying that every 1-1 human relationship can be captured in a word, in normal practice the language of relationships and social segmentation is actually highly elastic, depending on who’s asking how I know so-and-so.

Social networking offers the illusion of social segment control. Facebook lets you give varying levels of access to different contacts and Twitter lets you hide from would-be followers while letting you brush off the ones you wish you hadn’t picked up. These features have in common the basic function of filtering. The trouble is, you only filter when you’ve got something to say that you’d rather not everyone heard. Shielding someone entirely from certain types of information hardly fits the bill as a means to acting naturally before each member of your social circle in the manner closest to your nature as they know it. It might not be your aim to make your mom think you have no social life, but that’s a typical effect of contact filtering.

One idea I’m hearing brought up with increasing frequency is to employ multiple accounts, one for each social segment (usually dividing work from family from friends). I don’t think I’ve seen anyone actually do it, but then if it were done well I wouldn’t perceive it, would I?

Let’s say I were to set up multiple Facebook/Twitter accounts for each of my social segments, letting alone for now the inevitable overlap of friends who are also coworkers and cousins I invite to parties, as well as the possibility that some of my contacts are are themselves running multiple accounts for each of their social segments, including me on some but not others.

Even if I managed to sort out each of the people in my life into the appropriate bucket, how would I decide which of my identities to speak through at any given moment? That is, if each account is a filter to the world, how can I effectively filter the data of my life into the appropriate account? Is a work-safe life event also parent-safe? How can I spin one event so everyone can hear about it in the most appropriate way?

Looks to me like a mug’s game. At some point I’m going to say something through one identity that I probably should have said through another, thereby degrading the integrity of each. Or everything I say is going to run together, leading to a situation indistinguishable from the one that the creation of multiple identities was supposed to depart from, ie. “real life.”

If anyone is successfully employing multiple accounts to deal with multiple social segments, I bet they’re having a hard time being anywhere near as interesting there as they are in person.

Social networking doesn’t facilitate the creation of different identities, or the rigid differentiation between segments of one’s social circle. You don’t actually have multiple faces. You never really did.

These platforms just let each segment hear what you’re saying to the others, and in turn show you what goes on when people step out of your life to get on with their own.

Remember how it felt to run into your teacher at the mall on summer vacation? I think we’re going to start getting used to that feeling.