I’ve gone back and forth trying to decide if I want all of my online social spaces to communicate to each other. Most of us have different personas for different social contexts. How we behave during an evening with friends at a bar is very different than how we behave in a church. I’m finding, however, that the older I get the less this is the case.
I have the notion that existing research would support my hypothesis that aging reduces the variance of behaviors and attitudes across different social contexts. If the research hasn’t been done yet I would be surprised and consider it a free thesis topic for sociologists.
I’m not that old. But having a career, a house, and a family definitely throws me into a different social context than a lot of my friends and colleagues. About a year ago I de-friended all of the people that I work with from Facebook. I realized that I didn’t want to broadcast status updates about parties, drinking, and being a general smartass to people that I share a different social context with at work. As family members began signing up for facebook accounts, I was at first a bit apprehensive. But family has to, or at least should forgive most of transgressions. And these people already know what I’m all about anyway.
As time passed, I began to realize that fewer of my status updates were at all taboo. I’m getting boring maybe. So I added EffectiveUI peeps back. There’s nothing to really show or to hide I guess, though I’m still hesitant to approve client friend requests. LinkedIn feels like a more appropriate place for that.
I’m rambling. The intent of this post began as a test to see if Twitter and Wordpress are going to talk to each other as I expect them to. In the process I had to ask myself if this is even something I’m interested in happening. I suppose that my Twitter social context is close to my Blog and close to LinkedIn. Google Buzz? I don’t really care about that yet.
Facebook still feels a bit different. I turned off the option to update my status as I tweet a while back. It just seemed too noisy for Facebook.
Anyhow. This is something I’m interested in. Our online social contexts are expanding. Expectations are rising. And managing all of it is challenging. As I get older, it seems far less dangerous to merge all of them together.