Does Your Online Life Need to Be an Extension of Your Real Life

I have to admit it: I’ve been living a life of lies for the last 3 years with my two identities rarely even meeting each other. My first identity is the online one – or basically me when my computer is turned on and I write, blog, comment or discuss something. In this life I have thousands of friends across all the social networks I am aware of – even though the vast majority of such people I have never met or even talked to on the phone.

But there is also another identity – the offline me – and that one has almost nothing to do with web 2.0 and social media and is happy to have a family and a handful of friends and live in a Siberian city where I don’t think even 1% of the population knows what Twitter is. And while it may sound strange, my identities never mixed and were quite happy separated by the closed lid of my laptop.

Yet recently the situation has changed quite a lot to me due to a number of facts and this is what is getting disturbing to me – even though the double identities were not. In fact, I felt kind of uncomfortable when I realized that my real life is now making huge steps into my online life and noticed that my husband now has Twhirl installed same as I do and regularly checks his Twitter stream. In fact, I think he is in the phase of early Twitter addiction as he seems to spend way more time on Twitter than I do and he actually uses Twitter to comment on this or that aspect of my real-life behavior – like when I go to a girls-only party leaving him at home. And honestly, Twitter was much more comfortable without my own husband on it – even though I never update my own stream with anything that could be unsafe for my husband’s ears.

In addition to that, I happened to speak at a local web conference and even though there was no huge crowd over there (I mentioned the 1% of Twitter-aware population, right?), it was enough to get a number of new followers on Twitter and friends on Russian social networks. And again I felt really awkward as usually I get to know people via their online identities and only later happen to get to know them in real life – and it never happened vice versa.

I know that my approach to using social media and separating the two identities from each other is hardly a common one and most people use social media tools to build an extension of their real lives but it has never been like this for me and now that my real life is invading my virtual world, I can’t help but ask myself the question: should one’s online life really be an extension of one’s real life?

I have a feeling that many people around me began using various social media tools for business purposes and mostly communicate with their business contacts on social networks (even on Facebook). Not too many people began using Twitter from day one because Twitter was cool and fun – while many people joined because they worked online already and adopted new tools when they were launched.

And I don’t think I am the only person who does not have many real-life friends (or family members) working online as well: in fact, I only have one friend who knows what I’m talking about when I begin bubbling about social media while all my other friends have no idea of the vast majority of the possibilities in the social networking world.

This is why I simply think it will not be fair to drag my real-life friends into my very active social networking habit by adding them as friends on Facebook or teaching them what Twitter is and expecting them to follow me. I believe that the way I use social media will hardly be acceptable to the vast majority of my real-life friends and I’d really not want them to be exposed to tons of my Twitter updates, bookmarks and votes everywhere by adding me as their friend on Facebook. At the same time I thoroughly enjoy those endless commenting battles over social media etiquette or event so I devote more time to some of my online friends than I do to some family members. This is why I think that having a solid boundary between my online presence and my real life is a good idea for everyone.

True, I am in quite a peculiar position as I live in Russia while I blog on Profy mostly for the US audience. This strange position gives me an interesting advantage: I can easily decide what tools and what social networks are for my real life and which ones – for my virtual one. So I use Facebook to connect with my friends in the blogosphere and various web 2.0 people while I have real-life friends on Russian social networks. Unfortunately, I don’t think many of those people I talk to on Facebook or on Twitter have the same options available as they will only have Facebook and Twitter and pretty much nothing else.

Yet I have seen people creating multiple accounts – one for business purposes and the second one for their private life – on Facebook and even on Twitter in order to keep things separated. In fact, penetration of real life into your virtual one can be dangerous sometimes if you are too eager reporting on Twitter that your entire family is leaving for a vacation – only to return to a robbed house later.

So even if you are perfectly comfortable communicating with all your real friends online as well, I can’t help but feel that there should be some limits in how you let your real life show virtually. After all, if you talk to your mother every day on the phone and walk your dogs with your best friend every evening, do you really have to friend each other on Facebook only because you all are there? To me it seems that keeping a reasonable distance between one’s virtual and real lives would be a reasonable option to many people, especially if there are some things that you would like to keep to yourself – online or offline.