Living in public: My life on Facebook, Twitter, and, well... here

I was reviewing some social media aspects of a project I'm working on for a non-profit group right now,  and its president said he'd like to have me show him how Facebook works sometime.

I said I'd be happy to, but mentioned that I had friended him on FB and he'd friended me back, so I thought he already knew how it worked.

"Not really," he said. "I mean, I see you posting away all the time, and I realized I don't have any idea what's really going on."

And then I thought: Ack. He reads my Facebook.

Well, duh. I friended him, after all. Of course I knew he might be reading my Facebook. It wasn't like the shock I felt when my father sent me that friends request a couple of weeks ago or anything. But I suddenly had this oddly disoriented feeling, like different strands of my life were converging in a way I'd never really anticipated or thought about before.

It's not that I have anything to hide from anyone. I'm sure we all cancel obligations by saying we're sick now and then -- and I suppose that blogging or tweeting that I'm at the beach with the dogs when I'd just told one of my editors I had a cold and needed a deadline extension would be, you know, stupid, and I like to think that I'm not that. (Note to editors: this was a purely hypothetical example. I'm always truthful when I tell you stuff.)

No, it's not really that I have anything to "hide" in that sense. But like anyone else, I have a private life, my intimate relationships and thoughts that are nothing I'm ashamed of or that are precisely secrets, but they're just... personal. Private.

For instance, search though you might, you won't find me blogging or tweeting or posting to Facebook -- which clearly is an action in dire need of a verb -- about my love life, my attempts to write fiction, or the unbearable cuteness of my nephew Ronan. I may from time to time mention these things, but I don't write about them publicly. And lately I've been trying not to turn the provocative things my friends say to me into blog posts, or at least, be far more subtle about it when I do, see the lead-in to this post.

But the rest of my life? My political activities and beliefs, my professional achievements (or failures, not that I have any of those), my shopping sprees, what I'm reading, the movies and TV shows and DVDs I watch, places I visit, and of course, pretty much any and everything to do with my dogs?

Those parts of my life, as well as my daily thoughts and activities, are pretty much spewed all over the Internet. Just look there in the left hand column of this blog: It's my Twitter feed. Follow the links over to Pet Connection: It's my dogs' lives. Friend me on Facebook: Pretty much every news article and blog post that makes me laugh, think, or rant is posted there.

And people I barely know -- or even don't know, since a lot of my readers follow me on social media sites or read this blog, and most of them aren't known to me personally -- read this, just as I read about or follow people I don't know personally. It creates a strange sort of intimacy. I've become better friends with a few casual or professional acquaintances after friending them on Facebook.  But it also gives those same casual acquaintances a lot more information about me.

Don't misunderstand. I'm not railing against the loss of privacy or anything like that. I like the wired world, love the Google, and have a news alert on my name. If I wanted to hide from the world, I'd be living in a very different way.

It's simply that my willingness to live in public, and my ability to do so, and the size of the stage on which that plays out, have all outstripped the extent to which I've integrated and processed them. I know, intellectually, that all the people who have me friended on Facebook, read my blog, or follow me on Twitter see what I post there. But when someone from one part of my life comments on something we wouldn't normally discuss, about something we don't share, or I didn't know we did?

There's just this moment of dissonance, a painful little snap in my synapses or something. This person now knows how I feel about shoes. Someone else has suddenly discovered I have an undying passion for Lucy Lawless. Another just found out I'm a flaming liberal, or a dyke, or that I have no problem with the Second Amendment, and now all these pieces of who I am and what I do are being assembled into a bigger picture than was even remotely possible just a few short years ago.

I was just getting ready to publish this an clicked the box to send the new post to my Twitter feed. Ah, the infinite ever-imploding meta-ness of it all.

Comments

[nancy]

Here here. I have been kind of sort of thinking something along those lines for a while now. Plus Facebook ties me to a whole world of people I prefer not to see on my puter that I divorced via my kids who I follow to keep tabs on. Then there are the frienemees...

[Amanda Wray]

I just made a friend request and realized you don't know me from Adam...anyhow, I just discovered your blog and am enjoying it.

Amanda