mishmap

No more work-play division

Posted on April 13th, 2008 by Brian.
Categories: social networks.

I’m reading Everywhere by Adam Greenfield and came across a few paragraphs that describe today’s facebook/twitter reality. With employers googling and myspacing potential new hires, it’s unrealistic to be both a content publisher and expect a work/play division.

And above all, what happens when the composite view we are offered of our own selves conflicts with the way we would want those selves to be perceived?

Erving Goffman taught us, way back in 1958, that we are all actors. we all have a collection of masks, in other words, to be swapped out as the exigencies of our transit through life require: one hour stern boss, the next anxious lover. who can maintain a custody of the self conscious and consistent enough to read as coherent throughout all the input modes everyware offers?

What we’re headed for, I’m afraid, is a milieu in which sustaining different masks for all the different roles in our lives will prove to be untenable, if simply because too much information about our previous decisions will follow us around. And while certain futurists have been warning us about this for years, for the most part even they hadn’t counted on the emergence of a technology capable of closing the loop between the existence of such information and its actionability in everyday life. For better or worse, everyware is that technology.

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