Granted, this is not on the topic that I intend to be on, but it’s something that has been preoccupying me this year. I’ve been working on a talk about Managing Identity in Social Networks. A big part of managing identity is managing privacy. From the NYTimes article yesterday, “You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. But What About Privacy?”:

For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew. In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly. –Thomas W. Malone, the director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence

First, I find this idea of the “tribe” fascinating and very tangible. Growing up in a Southern Gothic family, the idea of the tribe is everpresent. Moving to Boston for fifteen years stretched the bounds of the tribe. But then, of course, I’ve moved back to a small Southern town a half-hour from much of my family, working ten+ hours a week on a fairly public reference desk in the University that makes up more than half of the town’s population.

And now I find myself creating tribes of my own. Twitter is probably the simplest online example. A constant, comforting stream of information about people I find interesting. Today I found myself worrying about a tweep who cut his eye over the weekend but still was trying to do his live podcast tonight. And considering what kind of tea a colleague brought to work that made her so happy. Or following the disappointment of another tweep who had worked all weekend on pathfinders and a workshop, only to find they didn’t match expectations. I learned about Oscar Wilde Day and enjoyed the Wildean quotes that came across my Twitter feed. I even had a tiny stab of disappointment as someone whose tweets I enjoy decided to stop following mine today (via the tribe-management tool from http://useqwitter.com). And as much as I enjoy the tribe I’ve made (along with the news streams I’ve created), I also like feeling responsible for my own contribution.

Facebook is a broader, more complex example. A meta-tribe. (Oh how I love anything meta.) It contains my work tribe, my tribe of library colleagues from across the country, a tribe of friends from the community theater, even a tribe of folks from media and PR around Mississippi who are interested in Social Media. For me, Facebook is a whole world of tribes, and all of them becoming more tightly woven, and occasionally crossing borders. And then my original tribe, the Southern Gothic Family Tribe, is on Facebook in Full Force. In the last two months, I’ve found out via Facebook about three engagements, a birth, and a family reunion–and these are first cousins, aunts and uncles, not long lost relatives. My 3-yr-old nephew’s abominable-snowman-dance graced my Facebook Wall during Christmas.

To match this tribal power, Facebook has developed complex privacy tools. So complex that I’ve had a hard time figuring out what they actually do. And I’ve been teaching classes about how to use them. The first step is to identify your tribes (FB calls them “friend lists”). Then you use these lists to allow each group to have varying levels of access to your information. Without these controls, it is as though you are suddenly born into a world complete with all the normal complex social connections and relationships, and everyone is in one big auditorium. Now try to manage your identity.

So…that’s what I’ve been thinking about.

I’m reposting blogs I have been doing on our library website, just because this blog looks sad and lonely and I don’t have time or inspiration to blog separately.

I’ve been thinking a lot about creating identity–and re-creating identity online. And about managing information as part of all of that. I presented about it at our MS Library 2.0 Summit. If you follow the links to the 2008 Agenda, you can even find the podcast, my slides and a handout. I haven’t listened to the it–I’m afraid my voice was cracking at the beginning…so embarrassing.

One of the central models for creating identity in social networks came from all the new(ish) Facebook privacy tools, particularly the ones using Friend Lists. You can create a system of relationships as complicated as you have in real life–if only you had time to go through and tag everything and then remix it all to give info to some and keep it from others. But it is possible to do. And so I’ve been mincing my way through it, realizing that I’ve been sending out info to everyone’s NewsFeeds from my applications that I didn’t necessarily want to (can also be controlled under Privacy)–among other social gaffes.

So in thinking about all of this as a developmental theory–I’m moving into some sort of adolescence, I think. Becoming an adult? And I guess that means figuring out what to blog about here, on my personal blog. So I’m going to be working on that. And upgrading my WordPress (remembering where those files are and how to do that…lol). And in the meantime, what follows is a sample of what I’ve been writing about–pretty dry, but think of it as evolving.

Amanda
So, here we go again…

So, I’m giving a talk at the MS Library 2.0 Summit on Managing Your Identity in Social Networks, and it’s something I think about all the time. Not just privacy, though that is a huge part of it—choosing how we want to be in public (online) is so important and there are lots of great tools to make that easy to do. But daily, I’m also faced with the headache of just managing so much information. Not extraneous hilarious cat videos on YouTube, but information I need to do my job better. Or at all.

I think part of the problem is me as a human being. I really have a vision for how these tools will help me provide better public service to our patrons here at MSU. I see that we’ve put all of our resources online, but we haven’t followed them there. In CHAT and over email, I see where our patrons get stuck and lost looking for peer-reviewed articles or trying to find a book. If they were here in the library, I could just watch them wandering through the Indexes or at the Card Catalog and call out from the Reference Desk. Or maybe one of them might screw up the courage to wander over and ask a question. But where are we now? For me, the 2.0 technologies are a means to an end. And that end is providing reference service to the Mississippi State University community. I am absolutely passionate about that and occasionally overwhelm myself with my earnest attempts.

Really, the human being part of me would like to be able to cut off from the world. I miss the time before cell phones when you could really be unavailable. Or away. I’m still on a primitive Motorola plain-Jane phone they don’t sell anymore. It does take pictures, but that’s about it. I’m reluctant to upgrade to a piece of machinery that will compel me to remain connected without interruption. Instantly uploading pictures to Flickr, blogging from the bathtub, twittering from the movies, facebooking on the beach, etc. Well, maybe I’ll still be able to take a bath.

Anyway, in trying to “manage my social networking identity” this week I’ve jumped into FriendFeed and Google Reader this week, sort of at the same time. I love Google Reader so much more than Bloglines. SO much more. And FriendFeed has the potential to be very interesting. Right now my only friend (imported from the Facebook App) is David Lee King. He’s quite the twitter-er it turns out. FriendFeed is a foot print of what you are doing in all your social networks—what you’ve bookmarked on del.icio.us, what you’ve shared on Google Reader, your twitter status, your blogs, your comments, etc. It’s interesting. And Google Reader has so far made it much easier for me to keep up with those blogs I always intend to read but haven’t been able to work into my daily routine.

It’s been a while since I had anything to say, but since I’ve started blogging at the conference website again, I’ve got overflow that needs to go somewhere. Try again if you can’t get to the site. Our WordPress doesn’t like our Server.

Amanda