Comment The construction of persona (Score 4, Insightful) 95
It goes beyond the problem of having different groups of friends. The problem is that in real life most people have many different personae. You would say and do things with your friends from college that you would never say or do in front of your boss, as the most obvious example.
IRL we put a lot of work into constructing and maintaining these different personae, and we do a lot of work to keep them separate.
With social networking as it is, that's all over. Even if you never participate in Facebook, you are probably tagged in dozens or even hundreds of photos, and the odds are pretty good that some of them show you doing things you wouldn't do in front of your boss.
So the question is, will we adapt the technology to allow the creation and maintenance of a variety of different personae, or will we adapt our own behavior so as to present one consistent, universally acceptable persona to the world?
I think many of us, particuarly the younger generation, are already doing the latter. In order to adapt to this, we have to adjust our expectations of people. Maybe as an employer, you just have to get used to being able to see pictures of your employees smoking weed at parties and so forth, and not let it bother you. However, until we adapt, it creates the problem that suddenly everything you say and do is potentially public (whether you participate in social media or not).