Source: http://www.gwalia.org.au/mirror.jpg

Danah Boyd gives a talk and here’s an excerpt (read the whole thing):

1. Invisible Audiences. We are used to being able to assess the people around us when we’re speaking. We adjust what we’re saying to account for the audience. Social media introduces all sorts of invisible audiences. There are lurkers who are present at the moment but whom we cannot see, but there are also visitors who access our content at a later date or in a different environment than where we first produced them. As a result, we are having to present ourselves and communicate without fully understanding the potential or actual audience. The potential invisible audiences can be stifling. Of course, there’s plenty of room to put your head in the sand and pretend like those people don’t really exist.

2. Collapsed Contexts. Connected to this is the collapsing of contexts. In choosing what to say when, we account for both the audience and the context more generally. Some behaviors are appropriate in one context but not another, in front of one audience but not others. Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it’s often difficult to figure out what’s appropriate, let alone what can be understood.

3. Blurring of Public and Private. Finally, there’s the blurring of public and private. These distinctions are normally structured around audience and context with certain places or conversations being “public” or “private.” These distinctions are much harder to manage when you have to contend with the shifts in how the environment is organized.

All of this means that we’re forced to contend with a society in which things are being truly reconfigured. So what does this mean? As we are already starting to see, this creates all new questions about context and privacy, about our relationship to space and to the people around us.

One of the responses that came from my “Would you Tweet for your School District or Organization?” survey (fill it out, please) is this one:

I would retweet the information, but feel that my twitter account is for “my” professional development and district “propaganda” may not be the best information for me to Retweet. I feel that my followers might not appreciate it. They follow me for pertinent or helpful technology information, not local school district information.

Excellent point. Do you endanger your integrity, and the relationship with your learning network (a.k.a. PLN) when you tweet/retweet work-related info for public relations (PR)? What’s more valuable from your perspective, tweeting for work-related purposes or maintaining that integrity? This is definitely what Danah was referring to!

For me, it’s a delicate balance but the integrity has to win out…it’s a “man in the mirror” thing, isn’t it?

Here’s the poem I’m thinking of:

Note: I added the link to Jack Horner in the poem above. I had no idea who he was. Apparently, “Little Jack Horner” was a nursery rhyme. Funny that Wikipedia didn’t mention the reference in this poem. Hmm…an opportunity to contribute a just in time connection.

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure