Managing Multiple Personas

It is a difficult thing to manage multiple persona’s. In a sense, that is the outcome of the empowerment that social networking sites give individuals, the ability to develop multiple persona’s. To be more specific, this is opportunity to build a persona that is different from whom we are. Sherry Turkle (1999) explains this when she writes,  “the fact that self-presentation is written in text means that there is time to reflect and edit ones composition, which makes it easier for the shy to be outgoing, and the nerdy to be sophisticated”.

As I build my personal brand, I must take into account the privacy implications. One of my classmates mentioned earlier in the forums that they never really keep in mind the content they are uploading. As afcallaghan mentioned in her minor blog earlier, “Tweets are made in the heat of a moment and retracted; images are posted and cannot be retrieved.” We cannot afford to be so careless, particularly in today’s online world; the risks of carelessness are life threatening. I am aware of the fact that even sometimes when we are extremely careful online, privacy can be beyond our control. We have seen examples of this time and again especially with celebrity. As we create another “world” all the threats of the current physical world in which we live in are also re-created.

With that said, how do you manage keeping in mind the privacy implications of what we post? I believe one must have a guiding force, as I mentioned earlier in my minor blog. My guiding force has developed into one that takes into account future employment opportunities. Parallel to what the Instructor Dale mentioned in the forums, it is important to know your audience. Know who will and can access your blogs or your social networking profiles and sites. Again there are limitations to the previously mentioned, because of the fact that the trail is almost if not infinite online.

AndersAlbrechtslund’s paper in which he talks about participatory surveillance really sparked my interest. The Idea that online social networking can be seen as a tool for surveillance, not surveillance in the sense of an authoritative figure looking over you, but a flat form of surveillance. In this form of surveillance the person who is believed to be under surveillance (in this sense is all of us with a social networking site), is empowered and has control by actively resisting the gaze (Albrechtslund, 2008).

I made an interesting connection as I read this paper. I made a connection to the fact that with online social networking sites today we now have the ability to control who we want to see what we want. For Example Facebook has a feature where you have the ability to pick and choose which friends you want to see your entire profile. You can also pick specific areas of your profile that you would like certain people to see only.  I must point out that such as the physical world there’s a potential of accidents, in this case glitches.

I would like to end on this note, how careful can we really be? Even without a Facebook account my pictures still wind up on Facebook.