Zuckerberg Doesn’t Get Publicy

One aspect of online identity, especially in the open web, is that people can have multiple identities: I am a somewhat different stoweboyd on Last.fm than I am on Twitter than I am on Tumblr. This is normal and sensible, since identity is strongly influenced by who we connect with and increasingly tied to the affordances that these services provide.

Michael Zimmer is reading the new Marshall Kirkpatrick book on Facebook, and pulled this out:

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” - Mark Zuckerberg

Zimmer goes on to dissect Zuckerberg’s pronouncement:

Zuckerberg must have skipped that class where Jung and Goffman were discussed. Individuals are constantly managing and restricting flows of information based on the context they are in, switching between identities and persona. I present myself differently when I’m lecturing in the classroom compared to when I’m have a beer with friends. I might present a slightly different identity when I’m at a church meeting compared to when I’m at a football game. This is how we navigate the multiple and increasingly complex spheres of our lives. It is not that you pretend to be someone that you are not; rather, you turn the volume up on some aspects of your identity, and tone down others, all based on the particular context you find yourself.

I go even farther, and argue that our identity is increasingly becoming a network of partial identities, linked together by the overlap (if any) between different communities’ constituencies and the princieples that they stand for.

We are not defined by any single profile or membership in any group. We are each more transcendant than that.