Ein2

I’m an early adopter of Google’s new social media service Google+. I’ve just realized that one of the advantages of Google+ is that I can write something blog-like but limit the audience for it. Intellectually, I knew that before, but it’s just really hit home because I wanted to share something but at the same time I wanted to limit the audience. It therefore shouldn’t go on my blog, because potentially anyone can see that. Google+ is a good solution.

However, it does leave me wondering how to structure this particular type of sharing. Most of my circles were set up around my various interests or social groups. As surprising as this may sound, for a person who seems rather open (or maybe I misperceive myself?), I feel I’m intensely private with a very, very small circle of people I consider friends. I’m therefore not sure how to share this particular thing. Yes, with that small group of people—who don’t even have a Google+ circle!—but I do want it to go a little wider than that. There’s a line to be drawn somehow between privacy and over-familiarity when sharing. Things to make you go, “Hmmm…”

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I’ve been experimenting a little (ha!) with microblogging at Twitter. Microblogging is like blogging, except extremely succinct–140 characters to be exact. They call these little updates “Tweets”. The web site allows you to submit new “Tweets” via instant messaging (Jabber), SMS, or the web. Other people can then “follow” you around as you post your updates throughout the day. Some people are following thousands of people. I’m not that ambitious. I’m only following a small group of people, mostly people from Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms.
If you want to follow my adventures, my Twitter address is @Eingang.

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I was listening to my ’50 Least Played’ list in iTunes a few weeks ago when it rotated to a Disney soundtrack song called Femininity from the 1963 movie Summer Magic. Talk about lyrics from an age with a different set of values:

Let him do the talking
Men adore good listeners
Laugh, but not too loudly (Haha)
If he should choose to tell a joke
Be radiant, but delicate
Memorize the rules of etiquette
Be demure, sweet and pure
Hide the real you

Can you imagine the damage done to an entire generation of young women upon being advised to “hide the real you”? So you would have a private personality that you could maybe share with your close girl friends and a public personality on display to your husband and his male friends or colleagues. I know I would find it very difficult, cultural expectations and conditioning or not, to go through life projecting a fa�ade so much at odds with my inner self-image, although even I admit to tailoring my self-expression somewhat for the audience at hand. Still, spending a large portion of your life suppressing your natural self sounds like the sure road to psychotherapy and confusion, because you feel that your ‘true self’ is not worthwhile or valued.

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