multiple [e] personalities
It all started with AIM and AOL chat rooms when I was 14. Then it was Blogger, then MySpace, then, eventually, Facebook finally added my itty-bitty (yet super-progressive) university to their repertoire. I was hooked instantly; It was smart, clean, intuitive and actually functioned without error messages or timeouts. It provided everything I didn’t know I wanted or needed in a social networking tool, that MySpace had never offered. And with privacy settings tuning everything to friends-only, I delved in. No holds barred, pictures, comments, notes and anything else that fit into the way I was using it at the age of 20.
Now that I have a better understanding of social media/networking and its role in my personal and professional life, I’m dealing with a bit of a juxtaposition in e-personalities. I’ve considered completely deleting my Facebook account to recreate a more professional, more grown up version… sans the pictures and videos and other college history that follows me there. But I haven’t – mostly because I use Facebook differently than I use other tools I’ve become active using lately. I keep in touch with college friends, high school friends, even middle school friends through Facebook. Most of the things I am talking about on, say, Twitter – are not going to be relevant to these people. And likewise, most of the wall posts, status updates and so on that populate my Facebook account, are neither going to be interesting nor relevant to my other social media contacts and friends. When these contacts want to connect on Facebook, I’ve found myself adding them to my Limited Profile list. I don’t want to lose the opportunity to make another connection, but I also don’t necessarily want new contacts and friends having full access to the less professional parts of my college life.
I guess I’m wondering if any other people are keeping Facebook (or other tool) separate from others. Are you experiencing multiple e-personalities? If not, have you had this problem in the past – but found a way to merge the two (apart from the Limited Profile list)?
Tags: e-personalities | facebook | myspace
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4 Responses to “multiple [e] personalities”.
Interesting inquiry. For my Facebook account, I modified what I had, deleting any incriminating pictures that could get me fired (there were only a…few).
The biggest change for me came with blogging. I was a fairly avid blogger with a fair readership from my college classmates. Once I graduated, I went through my blog deleting curse words, questionable material and the like in both my writing and in the reader comments. Then I abandoned that blog and went forward with a new one that pertained less to my life and more to my profession. I came back to the college blog recently and started posting more of my ridiculous observations. So all in all, what I have now is 4 or 5 e-personalities one blog for my profession that is all about, one that is strictly a beer blog with a couple of my friends, one that is more college-esk and ridiculous, and I write sports-related rants on my ESPN social profile and sports-related actual journalism on a virtually unknown site called Sports Central. So yes I am definitely suffering from the same syndrome as you.
I find that my personal and professional life run pretty close in parallel to eachother in terms of social networking. I haven’t seen backlash because of it…at least not yet. But I definitely think its good to solid separation between the two.
HA! I’m the third Jones to comment on this post
Only adding work/twitter/professional contacts to the “Limited Profile” is an interesting one. I’m definitely not as comfortable sharing my Facebook link with the world outside of college, but I also haven’t done much to prevent it.
I do feel the dichotomy of making connections and being professional. I think we talked about it a little in the webinar the other day – is there/should there be a line between friends and colleagues – Do you make friends with the people you meet on Twitter?
My own response to that would be – kind of. The Social Media Happy Hour the other night was perfect example. I go out to drinks with my friends and we chat about work, among other things. I went out to drinks with my Twitter contacts and we talked about social media and a bit of our personal lives.
Lindsi you ought to give http://www.rejaw.com a try…it’s a pretty addictive microblogging platform (unless you know of it already of course). It is new, and its all the rave!
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