Second, it goes straight to the line between facilitating social relationships online and business goals. On my first day of Accounting 101 in college, the professor said, “If you remember only one thing from this class, it is that businesses live forever. For any business to succeed, it is fundamentally important that you understand, believe, and work under this principal always.”

So death, as you’ve so interestingly pointed out, is where this line exists most emotionally. What’s to come of it? Geez, who knows?

For whatever reason, I got to thinking about this whole idea of context—what Whitney spoke of in her reply. Like her, I’m comfortable with the idea that our online “identities” or personas are related to a social context in a way that mirrors the real world. What complicates it for me, though, is the idea of “audience”.

This response is more or less an exploration of that idea. For what it’s worth.

To understand what I mean, you have to first go along with the assumption that there’s a qualitative difference between an identity and a persona. I would argue that a persona is what I project (and therefore create) in a given context and that an identity is perceived (received) by the people who know me.

You mention a great quote from Goethe: “I am not who I think I am and I am not who you think I am, but I am who I think you think I am.”

Exactly. Our identity is tightly bound with what we imagine others think of ourselves. But to take it further (or to flip it over), who I think “you” are (your perceived identity) is ultimately based on the persona you project: 1) what you say; 2) what you do; 3) the collection of attributes (intangible and tangible) perceived by me, your “audience” at any given time. Basically, our perceived identities are largely tied to our words and behavior. Conversely, our words and behavior are often influenced by how we imagine that identity being received.

To rephrase Goethe: “I behave like who I think you think I am.”

Sounds like Zelig, but we all behave differently with different people—whether we’re aware of it or not. (With Roxanne, a friend, I’m mommy Cindy. With James, another friend, I’m old screenwriting friend Cindy. With my husband, I’m cranky wife Cindy. ) Some people bring out the best in me; others the worst.

If we agree that social “context” is the space in which we occupy at any given moment, then I would say that within any given context, our perceived identity is shaped by our audience or, simply, the person/people to whom we’re talking.

In this case, personas can transcend contexts. I can be UX Cindy in many different places (contexts), I can even be UX Cindy and mommy Cindy simultaneously (as I was at the Summit) but whether or not it’s either really depends on the audience as much as the context.

So what the heck is my point?

If our words and behavior are shaped by our audience, what do we do in a place like Facebook, a context made up of multiple, disparate audience groups.

That’s where I get all anxious and shit.

In the real world, this persona shifting is manageable because we easily modify our behavior from interaction to interaction. On Facebook, sometimes I’m not sure what to say when considering a status update, because I’m confused about who the message is for. (Although most of the time I just keep my closer friends in mind and imagine that those co-workers and family members aren’t even paying attention anyway.)

Having a profile in several different contexts makes sense and doesn’t seem to be the problem. It’s only when the audiences get mixed within a context that things get messy.

The problem is that I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

At the moment, my feeling is that online communities and their attendant friend-making seem to work best when the implications of the context (level of friendship?) is clear and the audience within that context are—I’m searching for words—-members of the same contextual tribe (?). This could be, as you mentioned, some level of shared interest (UX) or context (alums of the same school). For example, Facebook would be a lot less exhausting and a lot more fun it really were a private room of all of my closest friends from college. The good thing is that we get to choose our contextual tribe, but sometimes that can easily break down.

On the other hand, tomorrow you might hear me saying what a great thing it is to have all of these overlapping personas coexist in the same space like some kind of social anarchy.

Facebook now has ways to create different levels of privacy based on categories of friends. We can create groups of friends then block entire groups from seeing certain types of information. This is great, but talk about management issues. Russ, you could take your honeycomb graph and think of the parts not as different identities but as different components of one profile on Facebook. That’s more management than I can take, frankly, and probably another reason why Facebook is starting to feel more like work than fun.

And Twitter: I invited two close friends to Twitter who have nothing to do with the UX community, then instantly regretted it. Thankfully, they never joined, but those anxious feelings started up again around the idea of “who” I was twittering for. For those two friends, my tweets would probably have been comprised of a lot of non-sensical inside jokes and pop culture references—something that might be considered “noise” among my UX friends. And why would those friends want to hear about some a kickass UX blog article.

Am I compartmentalizing too much?

I’m new to Twitter, but it took about a couple of months before I really “got it”. First it was: why am I twittering to six people whom I barely know. Then, once critical mass had been reached, it became more engaging and fun. Now, after the IA Summit, I’m totally sold. But I think that’s because all of the folks I’m following are UX friends and acquaintances. The conversation, in my twitterverse, includes the quotidian, the stupid jokes, the poetry of the mundane, but always bounces back to a shared area of interest—a contextual tribe of our own making. Or is it my own making?

I guess the bottom line is that the “at” (context) can’t really be separated from the “with” (audience). And so…how do overlapping audiences complicate our identity? When do they work? When do they fail? Does it even really matter? It’s an interesting idea to unravel.

Hope this reply made a modicum of sense. Thanks much for provoking the conversation…

Some co-workers are also friends, and some friends are also family. It’s common to express different parts of our personality to the same people, depending on the CONTEXT. So when you’re connected to someone on Facebook, that’s essentially like telling them that you’re friends enough to go grab a drink at the bar. When you’re only connected on LinkedIn, you’re communicating that you are strictly colleagues and nothing more.

I think the beauty of the IA Summit was how fluidly we moved from conference hall to bar. Essentially we opened both our LinkedIn and Facebook personas to one another. We felt we could be ourselves, our whole selves maybe. We were honest about situations at work, situations in our lives. And Russ, I’m pretty sure that’s true friendship.