Comments on: Only connect? No. And get off my lawn.

By: Rowin’s blog » Blog Archive » Happy median

Rowin’s blog » Blog Archive » Happy median — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:05:28 +0000

[…] in the past, simply doesn’t lend itself to such use, particularly when combined with my haphazard approach to delicious taggingÂ interesting material I find.Â Social|Median fulfills this need so effectively that at the moment […]

By: JohnR

JohnR — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:08:31 +0000

Or at least we would try not to be too interested in how to level Mages in WoW –
{still resisting a return to Azeroth}

there are definitely circumstances in which I’m not sure the various communities I’m part of would understand each other, but online tools do offer an interesting reflection on identity and personae.

the more tools join up the more the way we think about the our online identity should change. I agree that part of the challenge is for people to realize that some of what is publicly available belongs to another part of our life, but I’m not sure to what extent we should be aiming to separate these identities.

I think part of the tension I feel here is there is a delicate balance between keeping parts of our life (e.g. work and family) distinct and beginning to lose our something of our identity. I’ve seen this most acutely discussed in various theological discussions about the sacred/ secular ‘divide’. The key example there being that people have one set of behaviour on a day of worship (typically Friday, Saturday or Sunday) and a different set of behaviours the rest of the week – and that there’s something quite wrong with that (on both counts).

For online identity I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that I’d like to have one online identity that should mirror one offline identity and that people who know me online shouldn’t be surprised if they interacted with me offline (and vice versa). I guess, in my mind, the challenge is not to have different distinct identities (walled gardens) but different levels of disclosure (a labyrinth?) that means I’m not telling everyone everything about me all at once…

By: rowin

rowin — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:47:57 +0000

Thanks Britta for the Livejournal tip – I’ll look into it as it sounds like it could be really promising for my needs.

Neil – interesting suggestion about sharing links with a network, if that was possible it could be really useful.

By: neil

neil — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:23:39 +0000

Ah, I see what you mean. You can still share private bookmarks with specific people (‘for:person’) but you would need to do it for every del.icio.us person (or can you do it for a network?).

By: rowin

rowin — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:44:41 +0000

I have a friend!

I thought about making non-work bookmarks private, but then they’re not available for the non-work people I’d want to share them with – not like there’s anything I’m ashamed of or anything I just don’t think loads of links about warcraft are really what my work colleagues would be interested in!

By: Britta

Britta — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:39:35 +0000

I think a lot of people use Delicious the way you do — it’s designed to be useful to the individual, with the social part as a great thing that happens when so many individuals make their bookmarks public. (I think Livejournal has a useful way of helping people handle personas, with “friends locking” + custom filters, but it’s appropriate to Livejournal and maybe not to any other web service.) In any case, it’s fun to read about people’s delicious experiences first-hand; thanks for writing this down.

By: neil

neil — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:33:28 +0000

Rowin

You can make any of your del.icio.us bookmarks private (tick ‘do not share’) to prevent sharing them with others, keeping them private and avoiding the need for a ‘private’ and ‘public’ del.icio.us account.

I’ll be your friend on FriendFeed