Our Peas & Carrots Are Touching

Way back when I first signed up to Ye Ole Book of Faces, and possibly further back into the distant past with Xenga (iykyk) I realized there was a very weird situation happening where friends and family from non-overlapping social circles were all seeing me in the same feed, and could see the comments and opinions of one another where they were interacting with me.

There are of course ways around this now with setting up separate sets of friends that your posts are made visible to… but it’s sort of just short garden walls at that point.

In that same ancient bygone eon, I was trying to figure out what I should or shouldn’t post in my Deviant Art, because I had college artwork, personal doodles, ceramics crafts, fan fiction, original characters, needle crafts, and personal poetry. Some things I was working at a high level, relatively speaking, and other things at a personal or hobbiest level. The general advice was to “be yourself” and let others discover what you were up to from one thing to the next. “It’s your page, post whatever you want.”

This was not great advice.

I’m a human. I have personal opinions and views that are not compatible across the board with all of the forums and social groups I engage with. Some people I only want to share a part of myself with, others I want to let my hair be on fire while I scream out all my thoughts. Sometimes I change or refine my opinions over time, but there’s reputational lag from before when I had it less nailed down (or more nailed down!)

I used to talk about this all as “My peas and carrots are all touching”. My college professor, the local librarian, my drink-and-draw comics pal, my church friend, my aunt, and my fan fiction collaborator were all watching my facebook. I carried on for a long time dealing with “open minded conversation” in the comments and the DMs. It was exhausting. People have entire jobs writing and researching to author books and articles to discuss and be persuasive in areas like economics, politics, history, theology etc. It was inane the amount of time and effort it seemed to take out of my life to be expected to answer every off handed comment or opinion with footnoted details to support my own view. I don’t think that’s reasonable for the average person. I don’t think walking around working out how to have these interactions helped me to build joy, peace, and self confidence or brought me any lasting life success. Certainly you should be open to hearing what others think, but this was just anxiety for anxiety sake. And the meme statement is true: “Someone is arguing on the Internet” is not a good reason to drop everything and make a Federal case of it.

Then there was a crazy period where occasionally someone in one of my social circles would deep-dive into my social media to find something to be offended by and to hold up this ‘dirt’ to others in our shared circles to judge me according to. Cancel culture came for us all in one degree or another. Maybe not big and loud, but in whispers that created isolation, social atomization and furthered the problem of disconnect and emotional isolation at an already difficult time.

And so I have begun a gradual purge. I’m still out there on a bunch of accounts, but when I have time to kill, I go through and delete older posts and entries. And I have begun erasing and shutting down whole accounts which no longer serve me. I’m slow to join any new ones. These days I’m more interested in keeping aliases and privately being online, mostly to read and watch people who are creators or business owners or organizations or the news, and less so to ‘keep up with my friends’. The friends I can call, text, email, or join specific conversation spaces with.

This youtube video hits on exactly my peas-and-carrots-are-touching problem. It turns out it has a name now: Context Collapse. Who new?

Also, this concept comes up in a sort of older book I’m reading about Web 2.0 and Archival resources, called A Different Kind of Web

In one of the essays in the collection, one of the archival research librarians explains the necessity of cultivating an online persona that can be flat enough to connect professionally in order not to hinder the reach of her organizations’ research materials online.

This is really difficult for me because on the one hand, Authenticity is a major personal value, but on the other hand, I am also accepting of the Pluralism that is inherent in a free society. It’s just really important, I feel, to hold out humanity and understanding even with (especially with!) people you don’t agree with.

I don’t know what this all means for me yet, but I do know that I am searching for a better balance in building and maintaining separate online spaces and persona, without losing authenticity, and of honoring my original intuition about the need to consider where the intersections are.