These last few months, I have been experiencing little by little such online platforms as Facebook, WAYN, LinkedIn, and even Flickr, which are all supposed to be paragon of the famous Web 2.0. What they have in common is, as conceptualized by Heewon Kim at LIFT’08, the ideal of “self-branding” and “real-time intimacy”. In theory, this all looks good and beautiful. In practice, it can become quite tedious, especially for the generations who weren’t born in the social Web cradle. The main stumbling block I can see here is the different generational perception of the idea of “self-branding” and “real-time intimacy” and by extension of the way people categorize their various social interactions. If for the younger flock of the 12-15 years old it is almost natural to put oneself on almost complete public display for the whole world to see, this isn’t the case for those over 20 years old. And I’m one of those. I’m okay to somewhat advertise myself, but not too much and I’m not sure I wish to have everyone in my networks or outside monitor my daily activities minutes by minutes. Moreover, I do encounter a major problem with these online platforms, at least major for me. None of them (as far as I know, if I’m wrong, tell me) really let me categorize and put into a hierarchy my various contacts and networks. My social world isn’t divided between “friends” and “not-friends”. I’ve got family, relatives, best friends, good friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, class mates, sport partners, acquaintances, professors, former professors,…My dream would be to find a platform, which lets me create such categories and personalized displays that make it possible to show specific types of informations to each of these categories without them overlapping.

Basically, I might want my family, relatives and closest friends to look at my last vacations pictures, but not my work colleagues, professors, acquaintances. On the other hand, I would be interested to share my academic readings with other scholars and academic pals, but not with my other friends who might not care about this.

Right now, I’m mostly using Facebook and LinkedIn. The former has only one network category: friends. Of course, it lets me make specific groups, in which to classify these contacts, but that doesn’t impact what they can see on my profile. As for privacy, it has only 3 levels of protection: everyone on Facebook, people in the networks and friends. As I don’t use Facebook to meet new people, but simply to keep in touch with people I have already encountered in face-to-face interactions, I have restricted the access to my profiles and data to my “friends”. But I can’t further personalize what each categories of “friends” can see.

This brings me to the issue of self-branding and real-time intimacy. Even though new technologies are supposed to be changing the world. there are things that don’t change simply because of a new tool, physical extensions or machines. One of these is the way human being approach reality. Your life isn’t divided into two daily moments, like for example, living and sleeping. You do a lot of things while you are awake and actually, quite a lot as well when sleeping, but it is true that this has less relevance on the way you perceive and organize your existence. Life is divided into many categories and sub-categories of activities, involving different types of people with whom one has various level of intimacy. And so are social relationships. To make it simple, one can take the model of concentric circles. The inner most circle in the spiral consists of your family core, which expands then into the level of the relatives, then to the circle of boy/girlfriends and best friends, then to the social circle of good friends and nice colleagues,…all the way to the outmost social circles made up of the people with whom you have the lest emotional bounding. Usually, you don’t show yourself in the same way when dealing with these various levels of relationships.

In the not so long passed time without the Internet, self-branding was called more simply self-promotion or reputation-building and “real-time intimacy” meant time-sharing in face-to-face circumstances. Well, these mode of interactions weren’t declined into just two types, but adapted to the complexity of the entangling of situations and people from various social circles. The fact that you transpose these interactions to the Web doesn’t mean that your social world suddenly flattens down to a 2-dimensional set of relations, between friends and non-friends, whatever one means by “friends”. Indeed, I have a real difficult time calling “friend” a former professor with whom I have always entertained a relationship that was in great part determined by the social distance that exists between a professor and a student or a business contact with whom I hope nothing more personal than professional collaboration. For me, a friend is someone with whom I feel I have emotional and intellectual binding of a certain depth, involving a high level of mutual trust and desire for long-term involvement. I certainly don’t feel the same feelings for a professor or a business partner, even though I might have excellent relations with him/her.

I want to self-brand myself and share real-time intimacy in modulated ways depending on the social circle to which people in my networks belong. LinkedIn being very business-, professional world oriented, it offers a context that already determines the kind of network relations you are involved in with those who are part of your contact list. Even if some of your real-life friends are in it, this is mostly for professional issues. In a way, the boundaries are clearer. Facebook, on the other hand, is a social platform that puts no clear definitions on the type of relationships it offers to foster. Basically, it even boasts to allow the full-range of possible relations human beings can have, except that it then offers only one criteria of distinction: friends or not-friends.

Well, I think it isn’t just unsatisfactory for such a widely popular platform, gathering so many computer- and web 2.0-geeks for whom it would be certainly quite easy to design an application that can create these distinctions, but also outright dangerous both for people’s privacy and for their social well-being. On the first concern, Facebook is tantamount to flattening down to one level the aforementioned spiral of social circles you build throughout your life. For example, I have my brother, some really good friends, some good friends, ex-work colleagues, professors and business contacts in my Facebook networks. Since I can’t adapt my profile to the type of relationships I have with them, my professional contact get to see the same thing on my profile as my brother, who is a lot closer to me than they are. In your usual daily life, this is certainly not the case. The only way for me to circumvent this issue is to level down the content of my profile to what is appropriate to show to a business contact. That is, there is no way for me to actually share on Facebook anything more personal with my brother or close-friends than what I can appropriately share with mere acquaintances. Of course, I’ll never display my inner-most intimacy on the Web, since I would never do so in any other settings, but still, I’d like to be able to share things with my family or friends without automatically sharing it with everyone else.

The second concern derive from the first, as it might actually hurt your relationships with close friends or family relatives to put them on the same level as those people that belong to your most external social circles. My brother, sorry, isn’t my friend. And my friends aren’t my brother! I have a different type of relationships with him than with people who don’t live under the same roof! I don’t want that my family or closest friend feel that I’m treating them in the same way as mere acquaintances. I want them to be sure that they have a different relevance to my life. Facebook or other similar social platform completely shortcut this under a prestence of an egalitarian treatment of everyone. Even if I acknowledge (and gladly) that every human being is equal in front of the law and state, not everyone of them has an equal relevance to my emotional, intellectual, social and professional lives. And I do feel quite uncomfortable with the idea that I have to put them all in the same basket.

So, if you know of any social online platform, which allows for the infinite creations of network categories by each user and the customization of the user’s profile so that it has a different display to those in different networks, then, just put the address in the comment below. If you also know of such a platform that could also link to people using other platforms (like Xing,…), so that I don’t have to register and spread myself on the whole web, that would be absolutely great! I’m tired of collecting passwords and logins!