![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
on the Internet nobody knows you are a dog
It has become accepted that on the Internet you can experiment with personal identity: on the Internet nobody knows you are a dog. But I am not finding this to be true any longer.
As I acquire more web-based services, a Flickr account, mySpace (rubbish, I admit), several work blogs (Benchmarking, ePortfolios, Pathfinding) and a SecondLife I find that the borders between these potentially different identities start to collapse into a single, reasonably stable core identity: an identity of many parts, but all exposed. It has become, paradoxically, more difficult for me to maintain separate identities on the Internet. For a long time my Live Journal had links to work blogs but my work blogs never linked back to my LiveJournal. The Internet is community space: public and subject to the public gaze. The more presence I have the less tempted I am to act out transgressve fantasies. As I tag my browsing in del.icio.us, put sites in my PiggyBank, and start to think about mining my browsing history for serendipity I wonder if I want the world to know that I, too, have put the word "nude" in a flicker search bar: more than once. Woof!
I'm deeply conflicted about the personal/professional boundary. Or, perhaps, even the real/performed boundary (while believing that there's not really any such thing as a non-performed self). This account, whose identity you can probably guess, feels like my 'real' self, so I'm wary of letting it into spaces, like work, where I'm more inclined to perform. But I think it's an irrational fear, and it feels rude to be reading without admitting who I am, so here I am commenting anyway. Hello!