Fractured online identity? – Targuman

In the post Fractured online identity? – Targuman, Chris Brady continues the conversation we have been having here on this blog below, see my post: Fractured Identity.

In response to Chris, I have been thinking about the question of over-exposure in relation to the Long Road blog.  I agree with him that anonymous blogging is problematic and I am committed to blogging always as myself.  However, I am thinking about what Stevier says about her kids and allowing them to determine their own online presence.  Hers are older than mine, but I have not been particularly discerning about limiting the way my kids are exposed on my site.  That, perhaps, needs to be rethought.

In rethinking it, I may decide that I need to shift direction a bit on the Long Road.  And yet, the original purpose of the Long Road was and remains to blog a philosophical life.  For me, this means, to quote Aristotle, a life "with parents and children and a wife and, in general, with friends and fellow citizens as well, since humans are by nature political" (Nic. Ethics, 1097b10-11). Perhaps, though, there is a way to reflect on my experiences as a husband, a father, a friend and a citizen in public but in perhaps more discriminate ways...

Comments

[robin2go]

It absolutely is possible to speak on your life as a parent and husband. I speak about my family by using handles that will identify them to the reader, but not by name. http://tr.im/itmatters/ is one post written exclusively about my daughter. Do you know her name? On twitter, can you tell me the name of my spouse? It is always a choice each of us makes. Many of us choose to let them make their own choices about their digital identity (The Monkey, The Coed, The Boy Child) and then follow that up with discussions with our children about their online identity and digital footprints. Facebook is one such topic that we discuss frequently--and is actually one place I tend to protect more fiercely because it is the only place online that connects me to my children. As I am married to The Cop, our kids have several ways of looking at how people can use information they put out there in ways we might not have intended when we first post. I fully believe that, as we discuss our online identity, it is only but a facet of our entire identity. We choose what we want to put out there. We choose to share information. We choose how personal versus professional we get. And yet, even if I were to be wide open about names, faces, relationships, it still would only give you a part of my identity, by the very limitations of the medium. When I interact with you in person, I see you have a wonderful sense of humor, that may not otherwise come through when you write professionally. It's only by taking all these facets into consideration that I get a better picture of you, and vice versa. I only hope that when I blog--or podcast, or vlog, or meet people in person--that I am consistent and true to my own identity. In whatever way that might mean.

[Cole Camplese]

Chris, these questions are the ones that seem to haunt us as we move down the digital publishing path. I have been struggling with it all since my first post years ago ... now throw into the mix spaces like Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook and we are exposing slices of our identities all the time in really odd ways. A few years ago, my wife and I made the decision to remove all publicly viewable images of our kids from Flickr for a couple very specific reasons -- the primary one being that we don't want to create their digital identities before they have a chance to. Digging into the past I found a post about it ... http://colecamplese.typepad.com/my_blog/2007/02/my-flickr-decisions.html