The "Curated Reality" (and how to get past it)

11 Apr 2011 . category: . Comments

Everyone in my age group, seeking to establish themselves in their field of choice, is given the same well meaning advice:

Don’t share too much online, it will come back to bite you later on.

On the face of it, it seems like sensible advice, and there are plenty of examples to support it (read here and here and here). But what happens when we take that advice a little too far?

This Doonesbury comic got me thinking a lot. One of the characters is doing social media in what seems to be the sensible manner, but is quite unhappy about the result. She finds her social persona to be a person independent of her, an “overcurated” version of herself. “This is so embarrassing”, she says. In carefully selecting what she wanted to share of herself, she lost a lot of her identity. Her existence on Facebook has become a “curated identity”. Does it have to be that way, though?

Let’s analyze what happened in the situations above. In each case, an individual’s personal expression of thought spilled over into his/her other roles. Is the simple solution simply not to share anything that may be controversial or unpopular, given your position? Well, that’s one way to do it, but I think it’s about as subtle as using a hammer as a flyswatter (and as effective). I’d assert that there are better ways to manage your online presence.

Leaving aside the social media for a minute, I’d encourage you to think of your daily interactions. Do you interact the same way with your significant other as you do your friends? How about your family? Coworkers? Boss? No. That would be a rather awkward and painful preposition. A cynical person would call these masks–presenting multiple faces to the multiple circles in one’s life.

I’d call them identities, however. We can’t act the same way with our entire social network. We need to “tune” ourselves to the different channels of it. I’m not any less genuine talking to my boss than I am my friends. However, with my friends, I have access to a library of past events, inside jokes, vernacular, etc. I can’t take advantage of those things with my “talking to the boss” identity. I’d also probably get razzed to the dark side of the moon, too.

The problem with social media, then, is that it’s really easy to have a collision of identities. For example, in one of the stories above, a worker at a bank has two identities. One identity is as a professional in a corporate environment, representing the bank that she works for. The other is as a person, struggling in a lousy economy with a low salary. When she shared her comparison of her salary against that of the bank’s CEO, she was asserting the latter identity. Clearly, the bank didn’t see it that way, and promptly fired her.

Should she not have shared her thoughts? Maybe. But that wouldn’t have helped her express what she was feeling at that moment. It probably would have helped her to limit that identity to a “sympathetic audience”–a group of people who wouldn’t necessarily agree with her statement, but could constructively interact with it. 

I think that there’s a couple of things we can do to safely manage our social media.

• Understand the audience. If I complain about having a long day at work on Facebook, I’m certain to get a response from people studying for finals/midterms along the lines of “You don’t have it as bad as me.” I’d probably want to share that with close friends who’d be able to sympathize with me.
• Establish circles of trust. Going back to the the case of the woman and the bank, the woman clearly trusted someone she shouldn’t have, as the bank likely wasn’t one of her Facebook friends. It’s important to make known to audiences what it is their business to know, and nothing more.
• Cool off. With the ridiculous number of smartphones and other connected devices, it’s quite easy to rapid-fire an ill-advised status update or a tweet. Taking it down after the fact is a terrible strategy. Once the internet knows, it will not forget. Allow yourself some time to think about your idea, and present it in a more constructive way.
• Be responsible. There’s nothing in this world I value more than free speech. However, know that your speech can and will have consequences. Manage your online identity as you do your “real world” identity, and you should be fine. There’s no need to be fake.

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