Stephanie Rosenbloom in today's Times : "Now that first impressions are often made in cyberspace, not face-to-face, people are not only strategizing about how to virtually convey who they are, but also grappling with how to craft an e-version of themselves that appeals to multiple audiences..."
“Which image do you present?” asked Mark R. Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, who has been studying impression management in the real world for more than 20 years. Like other scholars, he is now examining the online world through the lens of impression management — studies that sometimes put an academic gloss on insights that seem obvious, and at other times yield surprising results.
“We’ve been struck by the dilemma people are in,” Mr. Leary said of a study he began last month about how people edit their online personas. “Some people seem to pick an audience. Other people pick and choose the best parts of themselves. As a professor, my Facebook page is just watered down. I can’t have pictures of me playing beer pong.”
People, of course, have been electronically styling themselves for as long as there has been a Web to surf. But scholars say the mainstreaming of massive social networking and dating sites — which make it easy to publicly share one’s likes, dislikes, dreams and losses in a modern mutation of the Proust Questionnaire — is prompting more people to “perform” for one another in increasingly sophisticated ways."
Identity online is fluid. You can be five or six different personas online, and you can invent new ones and delete old ones at will. I think this is something that the online privacy alarmists are missing. The sense that there is one identity, and that its secrets must be hidden behind a veil of privacy, is tied to the physical world -- maybe the way people are going to respond to the lack of privacy online is to be proactive in taking on their identities, and to shape and destroy them as they feel is appropriate. Seems to me that's a much more creative approach than insisting that we build more walls online to enable people to hide their secrets.