I want to stay hidden

Jasmin Tragas writes about expressing yourself. Jasmin asks:

Is it Facebook Faux Pas to hide your “wall” or friends?

Being an Englishman, I have no problem with hiding any & every aspect of myself. Are you looking at me, pal? Got a problem, have you? I'll give you a ****ing problem.

Ahem

When I set up my Facebook profile, I filled in the "relationship" status fields. As more people I vaguely knew friended me (& I them, link slut that I am), I became less and less comfortable with this. So this week I removed these fields. Facebook chose to interpret this as "Matt is no longer single" and promptly made this a news item. I then got a string of emails from acquaintances asking what the gossip was, when the big day will be and whether children were in the offing. When I got sick of this, I set my relationship status back to "single*" again. And later that day, a work colleague (in the course of a business email) offered condolences for my newly single status - plenty more fish in the sea, etc.

I examined the privacy settings of Facebook very closely and shut down all my alerts. I then removed my relationship status. Single, married, straight, gay, celibate, rampant - this is my business and not yours.

So we need to be careful how we present ourselves. And we also need to use care in our readings of other people. Things may not be what they seem.

We are engaging in a massive experiment here. An experiment in redrawing the lines of public & private. And this experiment will not be painless. We can limit this pain by being generous with each other.

Jasmin then asks some more interesting questions:

Another question - is Facebook really about connecting or is it about embedding your identity? Do you get to know more about your friends or yourself by using FB and twitter? How much of this is manufactured identity?

Now Erving Goffman would have a few things to say about this. My take is that our identities are to some extent manufactured anyway. We have some influence over how we look and what we do (but not total control). But these identities are also co-created with those around us. We perform ourselves (to an extent). And others feedback to us whether they buy our performances or not through performances of their own. So tools like Facebook are about connecting AND embedding your identity - because the two are inseparable.

Human beings have always indulged in hypocrisy and double-standards. They enable us to survive. New technologies mean that we must invent new forms of hypocrisy and innovative double-standards to continue surviving. Because let's face it, we're certainly not going to be honest with each other.

*Please do not tell my Thai mail-order bride this piece of information.