Status Update

After reading this article in the Washington Post I started to pay more attention to the life events and proclamations made back and forth between friends on Facebook. Individuals merely commenting on their daily state of being becomes in aggregate an accounting of a friend's pregnancy or continued search for employment.

Valentine's Day of course brought a spike in the professions of love and affection and I began to wonder about how a perceived instant audience of FB is altering our behavior to share personal details. Do we more readily share or express our ups and downs because the personal, yet impersonal nature of Facebook? Does the cattle call news need just make it easier to share big life news? Allowing us to include more people in our joy and sorrows, and therefore by extension actually bringing us closer together?

I'm thrilled when I see a friend announce they are expecting that I might otherwise never have heard about. And there's always a few go to friends for pithy comments and clever commentary on their life experiences. I've carved out time in my schedule to regularly check FB. Does this enhance my overall well being? Make me more connected to my fellow man? To a certain degree, yes. I am not one to advocate for the extraction of technology from our lives as a means of communication.

However, I certainly believe the line between public and private lives is more readily blurring. One of the more honest comments I've read in recent months about work life balance is that you can't separate the two. The balance is in the blending of them. By creating strict hierarchies of separation and punishing yourself when you fail to adhere, no one wins and more unnecessary is created. Balance yes, but full separation is highly unlikely. So how does this same logic potentially apply to blurring our public and private personas?
 
For my own consideration because I work in communications, interacting with new media channels in a closed a protected manner is largely against the very idea of exploring a mediums potential. If I tweeted and blogged to myself, I wouldn't gain greater understanding of information flow and user behavior. Yet, the risk is higher. I'm creating a permanent digital paper trail of my writing, my ideas, myself as an individual.

But fundamentally I return to the larger question of relationships and personal information sharing. Are we extracting a greater benefit out of now sharing more information about our feelings, our life changes? Are we creating a new set of expectations about relationship success and failure? Do you show your relationship status or not? Do you post personal pictures or not?

Inevitably age introduces a level of comfort or seamless integration of technology into how one expresses their thoughts and feelings about big events and relationships. So, isolating emerging users and fluent users (basically everyone under 27 or so) and focusing on the late 20s to 40s crowd, have we enhanced our lives or the quality of our relationships by documenting it on FB?

I would put forth a qualified yes. And yet, I find myself limiting my information on the site more and more. Deleting and removing images that seem extraneously archived there. And I wonder how the next ruminations of the machine will alter our behavior in 24, 36 months and beyond.