When the boundaries blur
I was curious to see what your thoughts were on this post from Alisia Wygant, a student in a course I taught last year:
"I've come up against an interesting situation, which I wonder about as more and more people move from being "social" users to being "social" librarians (or professionals of any sort). I was reading through a blog entry about being where the users are and participating in 2.0 products, talking about how librarians should really participate in tools like facebook and the like. I agree with that, but here's the problem: I already HAD a facebook page from when I was in school. (As well as some of the other tools.) But it seems to me that my network of friends from college and my network of friends from work are very distinct and should be.
As it happens, I canceled my accounts, because I felt a bit of rebellion against the lack of conversation that they caused in my social group. But if I hadn't, would I be forced to live an online double identity--ducking into virtual telephone booths and putting on my uniform?"
It's an interesting question, since so many of us have social software tools we use with colleagues, for school, and with patrons. When you are already using these social spaces, do you have separate personas? What if your patrons find the "real you" in there? Can the personal and professional really stay separate in social software?
Some interesting followups can be found at See Also and T. Scott. What are your thoughts?
