One self is not enough

http://jessepollak.me/2012/06/20/one-self-is-not-enough/

by jessepollak • 14 years ago

70 27 14 years ago

lukasb• 14 years ago

I brought this up with a couple Facebook PMs last week; they seemed nonplussed. One of them brought up the fact that the average user has fewer than 150 friends; he gently suggested that I was an edge case.

I disagree, even someone with 10 friends will show one face to five and another face to the other five (if those five are a separate group.)

Zuckerberg's comments about "integrity" suppose that we have an atomic identity that we sometimes modify out of weakness of character. Nonsense. Our identities emerge out of interactions (the linked essay makes the same point without sounding like an undergrad who just read some critical theory.)

The unfortunate thing for Facebook (and Google+) is that no one has made a successful feature set around different friend groups in the same service. Facebook might have to resign itself to being people's public face.

jessepollak• 14 years ago

I don't know if Facebook will be people's public faces. At least for me, it's a much more private thing than Twitter and I'm much more comfortable posting personal content on it. Is that not the same for you?

Also, I think Google tried to tackle this issue with Google Plus, but they were just too late to the game. Maybe if they'd come earlier, it really could have been a successful solution to this problem.

cglee• 14 years ago

Yes, most everyone I know delineates between the services this way. Twitter - public. Facebook - friends. Linkedin - managing recruiters.

icebraining• 14 years ago

I disagree, even someone with 10 friends will show one face to five and another face to the other five (if those five are a separate group.)

I completely agree. I'm hardly a social person, and even I have at least five different "selfs". Family, coworkers, college friends, high school friends, random people on the Internet, I behave differently with all of those groups.

ken• 14 years ago

All of the (moderately) famous people I know on Facebook have (at least) two Facebook accounts: their public / fan identity, and their private / friend identity. I think it's officially against the rules, but even when they obviously use the same name, and presumably log in from the same IP address, Facebook doesn't seem to care.

k-mcgrady• 14 years ago

It's not against the rules. You can have a profile (private) and page (public). They recently tried to solve this inconvenience with the subscriber model. People can subscribe to public updates on your (mostly) private profile doing away with the need for a separate 'fan' page.

ed209• 14 years ago

problem here is that when I post publicly for the benefit of subscribers, my friends and family also get that stuff - and they are totally not interested in it.

citricsquid• 14 years ago

I think the main problem with using Facebook comments is not so much that they assume you have one identity, it's that they don't allow you to isolate things between websites.

I comment on a lot of websites, the internet is my home, I don't mind people reading my comments on another website, if my parents saw my hackernews comments it wouldn't be of concern to me, however if all my hackernews comments were pushed to my Facebook feed and every friend on Facebook saw every comment I leave that would be a problem because it means I would have to consider them as an audience too when commenting.

Context is important, most people on Hackernews have the same background (technology) and will approach the comments others write in a similar frame of mind, however my parents would understand what I say in a different way and it would mean I'd have to consider the meaning of my comments to everyone, it would change the dynamic. I think it's more about context than it is "personality" or having multiple personalities. In some ways they're the same thing though.

FoxenFleet• 14 years ago

Isn't this was Google+ "Circles" was supposed to solve? It seems even if you did have just one permanent online identity, you could choose who would see what. Which it seems would work for the author. On the other hand, for public forums and anything else that would come up in a Google search would be tied to your name as well (which I think is what Moot was getting at). It seems in the end, most people would avoid being their "true" selves, even if they're passionate about the topic of a site or forum.

I'm one who likes to remain fairly private, and wouldn't want many of my Facebook friends to even know about a blog I may have, the type of Youtube videos I watch, or know of my Reddit account. Maybe I'm just old fashioned or self conscious, but I try to limit what people know about me.

andrewaylett• 14 years ago

The problem with Google's circles is they only restrict: if I write about tech stuff, I have no problem with anyone reading it, but I know that my family probably won't want to.

LiveTheDream• 14 years ago

This sounds like a use case that does work for Circles. If you post about tech stuff, make it visible to your tech circle and not to your family circle.

scott_meade• 14 years ago

One online self per service is enough. I can't recall a recent situation where I felt I was acting differently in public depending on who was around. Certainly not differently enough that when I'm sitting at my computer I'm going to try to recall which persona I want to wear at which time. Perhaps I don't get out enough.

boxein• 14 years ago

It's not as extreme as that--consider just the case where you want to share things with work friends that might not appeal to college friends. You're not acting different; you'd show the college friends if any of them asked, but you know they're bored by it so you want to keep it out of the timeline/tweets/whatev that they see.

prodigal_erik• 14 years ago

Ours is a nosy, judgmental species. Unless you can rely on being self-employed on your own farm for the rest of your life, you are someday (while you're seeking a job or an apartment or a partner) going to have cause to regret having put your True Name on a controversial idea. This is why HN gets substance while Facebook gets cheerful pablum from me, and I'm undecided about Google+.

mindstab• 14 years ago

4Chan's Chris Poole/Moot nailed this last year with his talk about the prismatic nature of identity.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/4chans_chris_poole_face...

moot• 14 years ago

Here's the talk that's from: http://youtu.be/e3Zs74IH0mc

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

1 self is too much!

The personality and egO that likes to joke on fb, the personality that likes to talk stArtups.. They are not really you... Eckhart Tolle would say..

philwelch• 14 years ago

Here I was hoping that someone had a crazy idea for a new OOP paradigm....

gioele2• 14 years ago

Same here: I thought somebody proposed the use of different _self_ objects in Ruby procs to differentiate between the original containing object and the calling containing object.

SimHacker• 14 years ago

Well JavaScript has "this", but also "var self = this;" to work around its horrible design flaw with closures.

Zarkonnen• 14 years ago

See also "The Social Graph is Neither" by Maciej Cegłowski.

http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/

And yeah, I have two Twitter accounts: one for friends and one for business.

margold• 14 years ago

Nice article, thanks. I find the idea that merely describing your social connections influences/changes them to be pretty insightful, so is calling the current situation a "social version of the Uncanny Valley". His advice of waiting for the current internet landscape to organically start changing into the right direction is one way to look at it, but I do not want to wait this long. There must be a less crippled way of bringing your social life online.

incongruity• 14 years ago

Good reference.

Here's another few I'd found previously on the topic of faceted identities; There's been a bit of research on this topic in the social sciences for a while now, for whatever it's worth, but here are some papers that I found insightful:

Danah Boyd's undergraduate thesis (Danah is now a Sr. Researcher at Microsoft):

http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/danah/thesis/danahThesis.pdf

A more recent paper from Yahoo: http://research.yahoo.net/files/pr308-farnham-1.pdf

And this much older paper makes it clear that the idea of personal identity being multifaceted is all but a given in many lines of research, pointing back to influential papers as old as 1968: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/965/hoggterrywhite.pdf

So, honestly, I've always been a little surprised that supposedly smart companies/developers at some of the hottest tech companies (FB & Google, for example) would build business models/big plans around such a simple model of social identity when it's so at odds with the way people really work.

aangjie• 14 years ago

I like the prism metaphor. It resonates with both concepts of multiple facets and filtering light differently through each. My first thought/equivalent for light is the stuff we share/publish on the social networks. Surprisingly, nobody mentioned github as one more self/personality.

pauljburke• 14 years ago

As the article states, this isn't necessarily just an online problem (although Facebook brings it into sharp focus I guess). Each group of people I know meet essentially a slightly (sometimes very) different person because the interests and hobbies I share with those people is a small fraction of who I am (I always assumed it was the same for everyone). At my stag do I had relatives, work colleagues, online gaming friends, my jui jitsu friends and university study friends all meeting up for the first time trying to figure out why on earth I'd spend time with these other people that were so different from them. Of course once they started actually having a decent conversation a certain amount of commonality was found (there seemed to be a large number of arrogant sarcastic know it alls for some reason) but while they kept interactions at a superficial level (like a lot of online communication I suppose) there seemed to be very little common ground.

gioele2• 14 years ago

Reminded me of Mark Pilgrim's One: «My attempts at compartmentalization have failed. There is only one inbox.»

http://web.archive.org/web/20110514112041/http://diveintomar...

One self is not enough

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