You, Yourselves, and Facebook

By Marc Fenigstein - March 3, 2009

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.”

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