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Comment by michael_dorfman | Hacker News Reader

I want to be known as a trustworthy, reliable father; a fun-loving, somewhat reckless friend, and a knowledgeable leader to my colleagues. However, I have no way to separate not only my past, present and future as Gibson suggests but also the different people that I want to be known as right now.

Guess what: there never was such a way, in real life, either.

Your friends may hang out at the same bar as your colleagues. Your colleagues' children may be in the same school class as your kids. Your "reckless friend" may start telling stories about you.

Controlling your reputation is hard. Keeping different segments of your life from coming into contact with each other is hard. Keeping secrets is hard.

Google and Facebook change the medium, but they don't fundamentally change the rules.

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What should (hopefully) happen is that after a period of adjustment, people will respect your right to be different in different walks of life. They'll understand that it's possible, and indeed desirable, to be reliable and professional at work while still being immature with your kids and occasionally irresponsible with your friends.

What really needs to change is the need to maintain the appearance of being different people (because you're always you, unless you have severe psychological issues you aren't really different people). People need to understand that what I do at home and what I do at work needn't overlap.

It's just an extension of the adjustment that started with dress down - an understanding that wearing jeans didn't make me any less smart than wearing a suit. People will understand that playing Mario Kart while drunk with my friends doesn't make me less able than if I spent that time reading Dickens.

I agree with this (optimistic) opinion a whole lot. I'd like to see that world come about.

The interesting part is when it comes to people who are already public figures. How do political, religious, or any other charisma-derived leaders cope with the fact that their public images can be ruthlessly criticized?

Even more optimistically, I hope for acceptance and a greater understanding of the narrative of the changing personality throughout life. I hope for a public realization that some politicians even under total transparency are good enough to be leaders. I also hope that this transparency actually becomes a valuable filter on good leaders.

So it's in those hopes that I sort of am happy to hear that our online personas are slowly eclipsing our generative, "real" personas.

I suspect that people will have no choice but to be more tolerant as there won't be people who are entirely blemish free when faced with the increased level of scrutiny.

David Brin's "The Transparent Society" has some interesting things to say about this sort of transparency. While I'm not 100% sold on his conclusions the analysis is well worth reading and thinking about.

I hope that is the case, but I'm not convinced it will be. It really seems like most people are using the internet to connect with more people like themselves, which seems to be leading to an overall reduction in the amount of tolerance people have for differences.

There are certainly pockets of increased respect and caring, but I'm afraid those are the exception and not the rule.

(I fully admit to being cynical and pessimistic, so it may just be my muddled worldview showing through.)

People need to understand that what I do at home and what I do at work needn't overlap.

The problem is they often do unavoidably, at least for certain specific professions.

Imagine a Preacher/priest/etc involved in a major moral scandal regarding his major. He would lose moral authority in his congregation. Even just being known to get wildly drunk and play Mario Kart on Saturday is likely to affect his ability to provide the leadership he must. The same applies, in slightly different ways, to senior military officers.

On the other hand, if I find out that one of my programmers is doing substantial hobby programming, I would certainly see that as a positive. Not because it directly affects what he does at work now, but because it will almost certainly make him a superior programmer in the long run.

You can, and should, separate them to a degree, but especially for public facting positions you cannot and should not try to create an absolute separation.

In the first instance though the events you list are not unrelated to the profession - they are linked and reasonably so. If someone stands up in the pulpet on Sunday and tells me about the evils of drink and adultery and then promptly disappears to get wasted and have sex with a married woman then that absolutely should impact his moral authority.

Some positions come with expectations that are entirely reasonable - medicine, most religious posts, teaching and so on.

The point is that minor, cosmetic and irrelevant indiscretions will come to be accepted, not just any behaviour.

> Your friends may hang out at the same bar as your colleagues. Your colleagues' children may be in the same school class as your kids. Your "reckless friend" may start telling stories about you.

There is a difference between what your reckless friend might spill out when he is drunk and having a permanent record which anyone can have access to at will (with little effort).

There is a big difference between acting accordingly to the social group you're into and eventually see the different segments collide, and exposing a publicly available book of all your diverse personalities in the various stages of your life.

What I foresee isn't a clamp down on privacy policies, rather a general people's flattening of behavioral characteristics, in order to keep the acceptable boundaries between all the different, inevitably public, social situations.

You're right - there is no black-and-white way for me to say "I am this person" in real life. However, when I attend a conference and introduce myself as tktktk and then continually project myself as that person throughout my relationship with that person, I become that person.

This isn't to say that there isn't a personality "bleed", only that if over the course of time, I reliably show someone one side of my personality, they come to identify me primarily as that person.

Google will slurp up all available information about me and there are no mechanisms on any one social network that allow me to present different sides of myself to different individuals or groups.

My work colleagues aren't even in the same country as my friends and family. The chances of them meeting by random chance is miniscule.

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