Intended Audience and Faceted Social Identities

We are heading towards a more transparent society, but at the cost of overloading our readers, duplicating information, and giving up privacy. Social networking software increases this transparency as one is able to digitize more and more of our thoughts and life. Unfortunately most tools don’t have a proper way to manage ones self-identity nor ones social identity; it’s very difficult to get content to it’s target audience without overloading all audiences with unwanted information. Tools have various levels of privacy protection, which are infrequently used.

We currently work around this issue in many ways: ?

• Creating multiple accounts in a service?
• Using multiple services for the same task and tying one username to one target audience?
• Using a shared account for a couple
• Tagging content so that viewers can listen on a specific topic?
• Reposting content to other networks
• ?Etc

The reality of how healthy people operate in social environments is that interaction in the physical world is highly complex and nuanced. We are multi-faceted beasts. At one moment we may be wearing our “Professional Web Dev” hat and the next wearing our “Barack Obama Supporter” hat. In the real world we often make this switches without noticing. We step out of a meeting and into the elevator and without missing a beat are able to "switch these hats". We negotiate social identities constantly for the benefit of our audience. If we communicated in an elevator the way we communicate online, it would be jarring and tedious.

We use Flickr to upload photos for different reasons: family, vacations, parties, work, foodlogs, art projects, political efforts, and supporting other publishing activities. Largely the various audiences and contexts which are the intended recipients are collapsed. Flickr lacks automated features to manage “channels” of audiences. If I upload a whiteboard diagram and a propaganda flyer, both end up in my photo stream. I can try to use tags, groups, or pools, to filter down my photos by audience, but this is labor intensive and may require too much coordination with the audience or other tools in my publishing toolchain. What is needed is a way to make these tools aware of “which hat” we are currently wearing and to only deliver content to the appropriate audience.

If I consume Jane’s activities via FriendFeed or a feed reader, I wanted it pre-filtered for her factes that interest me: Seattle, WebDev, BookReader, and DudeImDrunk. I want to never see some of her other content: ProudMom, SeahawksFan, and MyMusic. This is regardless of which tools Jane uses to author these posts: Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, etc.

I think the problem of capturing your current facet is related to other problems with social networking software: Information Overload, Information leaks, and Stalking. It’s possible that solving the faceted social identity problem may be a good foundation for solving the others.