All your selves collide

There’s been a lot of writing here and there about social networks and privacy, but I especially like how this professor from (one of my alma-maters) UNCG puts it in this article from the Washington Post:

“It’s the postmodern nightmare — to have all of your selves collide,” says Rebecca G. Adams, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who edits Personal Relationships, the journal of the International Association for Relationship Research. … “If you really welcome all of your friends from all of the different aspects of your life and they interact with each other and communicate in ways that everyone can read,” Adams says, “you get held accountable for the person you are in all of these groups, instead of just one of them.”

It’s a pretty smart article. I also liked the phrase “participatory surveillance” for describing what happens socially online.