Joseph Geierman

Last night, I attended the January meeting of the Atlanta Social Media Club. A friend of mine, Amber Rhea, was the facilitator for a discussion covering the following topics:

• Is your online identity different from your IRL identity?
• What does it mean to “manage your online identity”?
• Are there any off-limits topics on blogs? Who decides?
• Rethinking the personal/professional dichotomy and tearing down the walls of compartmentalization – yea or nay?

It was an interesting, if sometimes frustrating, discussion. Most of the focus was on whether people should curb what they say online because it might affect their chances for employment. To me, it’s a kind of silly argument. You can argue that what you say online shouldn’t matter to employers, and in some cases it probably doesn’t. That doesn’t change the fact that in a state like Georgia, an employee can be fired for anything that is not protected by the Federal government (race, gender, disability status, etc). There is no one answer about what is acceptable, because each employer is going to have a different policy or outlook.

More interesting to me, but barely touched on, are other reasons people might decide to “censor” themselves online. I also think it is important to consider audience and exactly what one is trying to do online. When I started blogging, in the early part of the decade, my ultimate goal was to get lots of readers. I spent quite a bit of time commenting on other blogs, worrying about who I was linking to (and who was linking to me), and writing things that I thought would attract more readers or generate a lot of comments. It wasn’t “just me” that I was presenting – it was a point of view mediated through my goals at the time (to attract readers and comments).

Later, the types of things that I wanted to write about changed – mainly because I began realizing that people I knew were reading my blog. In some cases, I’d initiated conversations or discussed aspects of my life on my website that I typically wouldn’t share with most acquaintances. If some stranger read about them, I didn’t necessarily care; it was a different matter if someone I interacted with on a regular basis did. For me, this is as big a reason (if not bigger) to consider what one is willing to share online. These days, I typically don’t discuss anything in a publicly accessible forum that I wouldn’t be comfortable sharing with a casual acquaintance.

I think the key thing to remember is that we present different aspects of ourselves all the time. There is nothing all that new or shocking about managing one’s identity – whether it is on a blog or at a cocktail part. We make calculated decisions about how we want others to see us, and those decisions are going to be different for everyone. Overall, it was an interesting discussion. Amber did an good job of leading it in a space that was both loud and chaotic. I had a good time and am glad I went.