As I have aforementioned, I decided, after years of keeping my life somewhat private, to join a variety of 'social networking/media sharing' sites, partly because I saw the use and value in some of them and partly for research. As ideas and development for freeformed began to take shape, I thought it would be wise to use what others are using online to share media and communicate with people to see what was really valuable, what the implications were and what was wrong with the current models. After doing so, I have found a lot of things I like and a lot of things that I find strange and even somewhat scray. But I really began thinking about the implications of leading a public social life when I friend of mine, somewhat computer illiterate, called me and asked me to help him permanently delete his myspace profile. When I asked him why he was so determined to do this right then and there, he told me that he was tired of everyone knowing his business, people contacting him from years ago that he no longer wanted to speak to and getting strange friend requests from people he didn't know. He then said something interesting, he said he wanted to go back to being just him.

That statement as simple as it is maybe somewhat profound. Is it possible that in our rush to easily share our lives and network with others online, we have become something other then ourselves, that we have taken on new personas and let too much of our lives be public? I used to write rather frequently in a personal blog that a few of my friends would read from time to time. Then one day I woke up and realized that while I didn't mind these select people knowing my inner thoughts, it started to feel kind of strange that instead of speaking with me about the things that were going on in my life face to face or (in the case of my long distance friends) on the phone, they were reading about it online. It felt very disconnected and odd after a while. I'm not sure yet if I am going to stop writing in this blog completely, as I go through phases of being comfortable with sharing my personal ideas to being very private. But I think that after taking the plunge and putting myself everywhere, I am starting to feel the personal reprecussions.

In a strange twist, my friend so determined to cancel his myspace, just signed up for radar and uses flickr every so often. When I asked him what the difference was just to see his thoughts, he said that, especially radar, feels more private, that he can share his life with only a select few people and not be easily searchable by those he either doesn't know or doesn't want to know. Especially as it relates to developing freeformed, it seems that the concept of providing people with the possibility of anonimity is incredibly relevant for reasons far beyond the political implications in third world countries. I'm sure that not everyone feels like my friend, or even possibly like me, and not everyone has had bad experiences with being socially public. But at the same time, I am starting to believe that it is highly possible that a good number of people do not want to share with everyone, especially about certain things in their life. A cute picture of your dog may be irrelevant if you send it to flickr, but some things are not. The possibilities of being able to communicate with others you don't know about relevant topics using media and your own voice is endless and powerful, but, as I am now starting to realize, it can also be scary and weird. Food for thought.