I’ve been experimenting with being a little more public and a little less guarded about my online communications over the last two weeks, and so far my experiences have largely been positive. I’ve discovered new voices and made new contacts (as impermanent as they may be), and these new contacts are causing me to adopt a more expansive view of the world.
I’ve talked about transparency and privacy before in this and other spaces, but it was a question posed by a friend over Twitter that got me thinking about the veil of secrecy (*insert suspensful music here*) I draped over myself in the last couple of years. The friend said that she believed in being transparent online and in real life, but that she wondered if she would come to regret that later. I started to think about what transparency meant, and whether there could be different contexts for disclosure and living your online and offline lives. I began to question what I gained by being so quiet over the last few years; all I managed to get out of self-editing and self-censorship is an overdeveloped sense of inadequacy. I started to think that the ideas I had to offer to anyone who cared enough to read them weren’t very important at all, and weren’t worth the energy it took to organize my thoughts and to put fingers to keys.
Then you add the fact of living a life that may be different than most others and the condemnation from friends, or the professional repercussions, and it’s enough to keep a person — okay, to keep me from wanting to express any thought that wasn’t sanitized.
So people like myself started to create separate online identities, drawing clear divisions between our personal and our professional lives. I discovered that blogging about only usability not only bored me, but it limited me to such a degree that I figured that if I didn’t talk about only usability here at cecily.info, that it was better not to talk about anything at all. Similarly, I couldn’t always talk about the things that were happening in my personal life because there were other parties to consider, and just because I wanted to be a blabbermouth, it didn’t mean I could put their business out on the street along with my own. Being caught between these two divergent camps, is it any wonder that I’d pretty much given up on blogging altogether?
I think that the emergence of Facebook, especially since it opened the doors to all people, has made it possible for people to blur those lines between personal and professional content (and contact). You can still keep up with the people in your industry, but speaking for myself, I’m a little less interested in reading a blog by a trusted industry colleague that is completely devoid of any personal content. It’s the personal stuff that makes me want to get a little closer to a person. It’s when we draw connections between us and others that we can take the first tentative steps toward building communities.
I’ve been doing some reading over at Jefrey Taylor’s Organic Conversations about natural communications and how to conduct conversations in a more organic, or “real” fashion, and I’m buoyed by what I’ve read there so far. According to Taylor, becoming a connector is the key skill for persuasive conversationalists to learn. Back when I wrote that piece on black bloggers and building community the folks who gathered to comment there talked about how they reached out to people based on shared interests, and how those shared interests crossed all lines. There were cross-connections, and there were instances where there was no common ground at all, but the thing that held these different aspects of their identities together was that they acted as connectors. What we did — very well — was to connect to people, understand the needs and interests of the people we connected to, and helped to build connections with new people who wouldn’t have met otherwise.
We did this by being transparent.
We did this by making and honoring the unspoken commitments we made to each other.
By going silent, I broke the commitments I made to people in my circle. If I have any regrets at all, it’s that one. I don’t owe anything to anyone except myself, but in order for me to help sustain this growing community, I need to remember that honoring my commitments only strengthens the communities and connections I’m a part of.
