It’s a reality of the social web: the more we put ourselves online, the more our personal and professional worlds overlap — sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, and sometimes it’s just just uncomfortable.
I haven’t personally experienced any drama or anything like that, but my Twitter account has been going through an identity crisis. When I got tired of bogus accounts requesting to follow me, I got frustrated and marked my account “private.” For whatever reason, it helped with the Twitter spam; but I lost a lot of the transperency and immediacy that makes web-based interaction so exciting. Marking one side of a conversation “private” essentially suffocates the open dialogue.
In any case, I’d been rereading my old tweets, and I had to admit that the stuff I post ranges from fascinating to mundane, and the list of people I follow includes family, friends, coworkers, and people who I find interesting. Of course, not all these people will care about what I tweet; or more accurately, they won’t care about what I tweet in the same ways.
So tweeting became uncomfortable. How could I tweet about a bad cold or about car problems, actually expecting people that I never talk to and that I’ve never met to care? Not that I think these people are that cold or callous — I just don’t expect some of the people I follow (and in fact, some of the people who follow me) to be that invested in the quality of my day.
In any case, I thought about deleting all my old tweets and starting over, but something about that didn’t sit right with me either. While perhaps I could reinitiate the conversation as transparent, I also would have undone whole webs of interaction, many of which mattered.
The solution? Well, now I have two Twitter accounts.
I’ve kept my personal account, which is still marked “private,” and I’ll use it to tweet about (for lack of a better word) personal things — the minutiae of my day, I suppose — and to interact with people I consider friends. But I also have an additional Twitter account, where I’ll tweet (again, for lack of a better word) professional things that are more in keeping with the theme of this blog: libraries, politics, innovation, radicalism, and so on. This second Twitter account will remain public.
We all lead both personal and professional lives. While my personal life is far from un-professional and while my professional life is inevitably personal at times — the two simply don’t need to mix.