You, Yourselves, and Facebook

It’s not a new concept that just as we moved from an analog age to a digital age, we are now moving from a digital age to a virtual age. Cloud services, social networks, and VOIP are all facilitating the virtualization of our world and our selves. Interestingly, we are not virtualizing ourselves as a single entity. We are creating multiple personae for individual contexts. These are not characters we play, like Second Life; these are each intended as accurate but distinct representations of our true selves. We may, for example, maintain very different personae for Linked-In, Facebook, and our personal blog (sometimes several personal blogs). I call this phenomenon “segmented virtualization.”

Internet age has made our lives more and more public: the information is out there and we have limited control over its proliferation. We hear very much about identity theft, but there is little formal commentary on the social implications. We create multiple personae as a reaction against this loss of control – much like a media blitz or propaganda, this is a proactive effort to shape our public image before the internet does it for us. Again, unlike Second Life, the goal isn’t anonymity; it is public relations – each of these personae are supposed to be you, the person you wish to be in a given context. And you want to keep it very separate from the other yous.

Currently, the internet facilitates this segmentation of our virtual selves, as each of these communities are walled gardens; because they are competitive, they are not interoperable. However, our lives are interoperable; work acquaintances become friends and suddenly want access to your Burning Man photos, friends find you on Linked-in and are shocked to discover you’re “totally corporate and, like, tuck in your shirt and s***.”

The implications are significant, both for our personal lives, and for the market battleground of social networks. If social networks fail to maintain these walls, or worse facilitate their destruction, the personal-social costs begin to outweigh the benefits and there are two possible reactions once that scale tips: moderate your stream of information to the lowest common denominator to ensure it is inoffensive to any of your audiences, or withdraw completely by shutting down your accounts and proactively removing any publicly available information. It is a rebuttal of Metcalfe’s law –there comes a point where the utility of a network begins to decline with more nodes. Linked-In understands this, and has been extremely strict about maintaining the professionalism of the network, resisting the temptation to expand into clearly available social functionalities. This will serve them well in the long term.

Facebook, on the other hand, wants to own it all; they want every node (person) on earth. Fueled by, and now beholden to the promise of, extremely rapid growth they have taken several distinct steps to break down social walls in return for more nodes and connections. This has been thus far tolerated by most, but if they don’t take specific steps to protect desired walls between our circles, they will eventually self-destruct.