10 years ago, most of us didn’t have online personalities. Only the more tech or computer savvy among us tooled along on the information highway, coming up with online handles that defined us in chat rooms, relationships that might occasionally carry over into email or IM, but ultimately made us known to only a small segment of people. In a way, it was easier than to hide behind these online personas. Now, our identities online are no longer personas, they are extensions of our physical, everyday selves. I myself exist on a range of social networks, connected across the interwebs via this blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email and random other services for which I have registered and forgotten. My job is as a website and social media manager, so a portion of myself extends to that company’s online persona as well. So many facets of ourselves, how is it possible to have privacy?
To me, privacy is not so much an issue as the emotions behind it. Many people don’t want their locations tracked, don’t want their personal and professional lives to intersect. They are ok with one group knowing that they ate breakfast at the Cracker Barrel, but would rather the other set not know that they have a special fondness for Cracker Barrel’s cheesy hashbrowns. And I can understand that mentality, I suppose. I am realistic enough to know that spending my day monitoring Facebook and Twitter feeds mean that I have become numb to the lines between personal and professional. I am surrounded by people whose lives are intertwined. I don’t so much care anymore who knows where I am, what I had for breakfast, my thoughts on social media management or Sandra Bullock’s recently publicized divorce from Jesse James.
At the end of the day, I care about the emotion behind it all. We all preach that privacy is no longer an option in an age when all of us are constantly electronically connected, but what about the privacy of feelings? A bridge that I don’t think I could ever cross would be to broadcast or discuss my own inner monologue, or my true feelings on areas that I’m sensitive about. Disagreements with friends or family, hurt feelings, misunderstandings…all of those more tender emotions are things that I would never and could never broadcast. I am amazed when I read articles about couples who fight via Facebook, breakups that happen over Twitter, raw, vulnerable emotions splashed across the web for everyone to see. In all of this, I suppose that is what I understand the least. Social media and where it’s heading is a passion; learning about it, discussing it, probing the sociological patterns behind it all comprise my day, and led me to the position I am in now. That place where peoplle are comfortable exposing their innermost feelings…that is the part of social media that scares me.
How alone are those of us who cannot do that? Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, even Lois Lowry and Madeleine L’Engle…all these author’s envisioned futures where we were both completely connected and disconnected from each other. Futures where technological efficiency has replaced human emotions. How easy to feel that you have a million friends and acquaintances that stretch across the internet, yet how awful to feel that there is not a single person you can talk to truly, deeply, in any of those places when your feelings are hurt.
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