A writer for
Times Online found himself in a predicament trying to keep his personal and professional lives seperate when he created a Facebook account. In having both work and friends on his social networking page he found his work colleagues were getting too much of a look at his personal life. The realisation he came to was that some of the more circumstantial aspects of himself that he might reveal, like his favorite movies, lowered the esteem people at work had of him. In the end he found himself deleting off all the personal information, and even detagging himself from pictures he thought were not showing him in a good business light.
I had a similar problem myself when some work friends and even some customers found out I was on Secondlife. I had to question whether my avatar's black trenchcoat and huge anime style warhammer show me in a less proffesional manner than I projected at work or on site. Also without context some of the people I had as friends may look a little strange. If you have been in Secondlife you know how varied the avatars can be. In the end I made a second avatar which I used on the one or two occasions that a work related person wanted to have an SL meetup.
There is an old adage that you should never let anyone from work see you less than completely dressed. The issue is not one of propriety it is one of boundaries and vulnerability. All people stereotype others, it is a necessary survival skill for dealing with the volume of information we need to process. We only have the time to completely contextualise the entirity of the people that are closest and most important to us. For everyone else we have a high tendency to make snap judgements on peoples personality and abilities on a limited set of information, and these are often not correct. As we know this happens, we chose to show only those bits of our personalities that we believe are relevant to the group we are in. We behave differently at work then at home or if we are out with our friends. This is why it is often uncomfortable if our work and personal worlds collide, these two worlds often see us quite differently and having those views cross over is uncomfortable.
Online I have my work and non-work contacts seperated as much as possible. There are a few people that cross over, but they are in the minority. In my case I use Facebook for my personal and online friends and linkedin for my work contacts. That was the idea at least. I have ended up with a few work people on Facebook as they have found me there and sent me invites. And rejecting an invite from a work person could be worse than having them see whats on your profile.
In the end I am in the same position as the Times Online writer, where I restrict what I put on my facebook account in case it doesn't portray the right image out of context. I end up not using facebook as much as I might, or for the things I could as I am restricted by the openess of the information crossing too many of the groups in my life. I wonder how many other people are in the same situation where the openess of the platform restrict the information they put there, and therefore the value they get from the platform. Given the permanance of information on the net, I also wonder about kids and teens that put information up without considering the potential impact. Will they later regret some of the information they have placed?
