Liked on YouTube: Let’s stop this multi-identity madness https://youtu.be/xAU0hugRM-k
I came across this on my recommended youtube list today and smiled. It’s something Jeremy and I had a conversation (via the blog) about early on. Identity, hiding your identity and having different identities for different things. I wondered if having someone deliberately determine which bits of themselves (true or created) they allow to be seen in a situation, would that affect the creation of community. If you know someone is hiding their identity behind a “handle” or posts a picture of a bike instead of their face, does this affect your trust of them? Is there a difference in someone who uses multiple online accounts to try to manage traffic than someone who has multiple online accounts because they don’t want certain one community to be visible to another?
There are obviously plenty of examples of this in the offline world, it’s not an online phenomena, and there will be times when we see this as acceptable or not but the question remains about how this affects perceptions of that person or their relationship to you.
Dirk seems to feel as strongly about identity and that having multiple identities that we use for various situation isn’t healthy.
On the flip side though, I am not the same character at work as I am in my personal life. I believe that at work I should portray a certain element of business-like behaviour, however, is this a change of identity or is it just a change in behaviour?
So many questions.