I’m a web master of a large forum and the members know me as, well, a ruthless dictator and tyrant. It’s part of the job when you need to be judge and executioner and at time force people to do what you want them to do. To them, I’m an Oz-like figure and that suits me well.

In “real life” I’m not that person at all. These are two entirely different “people”, characters or roles I play and each has they own social network and each their own separate identities.

I am NOT a fan of social networks for one simple reason: social identities are uni-dimensional, singular and absolute. The full depth of my social identity doesn’t begin to encompass the full scope of my personality or my identiy. I’m not the same person to all people and I don’t share all of my life with all of my friends (real or otherwise).

I don’t want my grandmother or my niece knowing “I’m a fan of Whips and Chains” or my boss knowing I f***ed off from work early because it was too nice a day to waste it inside or that he’s an imbecile even if I choose to tell my S&M friends I think so.

The idea that you can capture the entire identity of a person in a single place is false logic and even if you could I would consider that yo be a gross violation of my person and my privacy and no, I don’t trust that Facebook or Google or whoever you choose will keep my secrets secret.

I don’t like having my real name associated with my facebook profile and that is why I limit my facebook friends to only a handful. If your Facebook profile is all you are then I probably wouldn’t want to be your friend anyway.

“If Relationship George walks through that door, he will kill Independent George! A George divided against itself, cannot stand!”

I don’t think social networking, facebook in particular, is the panacea people claim it to be because it doesn’t deliver on what it promises which is a singular, uni-dimensional profile of a multi-dimensional, dynamic and complex human animal. If they did I wouldn’t go anywhere near them.

To continue, the problem with that is the ridiculous amount of power that will be had with that type of information. I already felt strange about my twitter account being my name… but like you also mentioned, it allows for a transparency that is necessary in the social realms that Twitter and Facebook calls home.

It’s not that I’m a conspiracy nut or anything like that, I just value my privacy a lot and would rather avoid the social network completely instead of getting the “forced privilege” to have my name in some vanity URL.

Great post, great read.

Capricious: prone to irrational and unpredictable changes in mood and behavior.

Sounds like Facebook to me.