Greetings!
Over the past few weeks, I've been fully establishing myself on every online social website. This morning, while checking into the latest activity on each, I realized how similar it feels to what I imagine inter-dimensional travel must be. On each site, some of the same characters exist. They display slightly different personalities, and share information appropriate to the individual site purposes. The Facebook world is younger and more intimate, and has by far the largest community. LinkedIn is a little older, and consumed with the importance of networking and making connections. GooglePlus is the newest site, filled with a more mature user base, with the least-developed features. MySpace and the others seem to be fading...
When I logon to each, I keep thinking I should change my user name to one which reflects some acknowledgement of the reality there. My Facebook avatar ought to be the young high school surfer dude whose nostalgia for the past, and his friends from San Diego, reminds him that it was those childhood years that shaped his values and loves.
My LinkedIn avatar should be able to answer the question one gets when first introduced (What do you do?), and should somehow reflect a community-organizer, nonprofit activist, and government bureaucrat.
GooglePlus's image would be the young elder I think I am now. Seven years into retirement, traveling twice a year, and working as hard as ever to contribute my resources effectively to bring about change.
But I find that I can't do it in one world alone. Not everyone I care about is in any one world. Each day, I have to pursue and explore adventures in each, and that the crossover benefits are real and mostly unpredictable. There are far too many of my friends from my middle age who hang out in Facebook, but whose creativity is displayed in GooglePlus products (YouTube, Picasa,blogging, etc.) The art of it is how you keep the interactions as real as possible, and find ways to bridge the spaces in-between.
Definitely not for the apathetic.
Gregory Fearon
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