Although I’m fairly comfortable with being online, I’m definitely concerned about revealing too much.
Thanks for exploring this important area of ambient intimacy.

Actually, everyone’s developing fairly complex carve-ups of their contacts, deciding who’s in each group and collectively finding particular ways in which they communicate with that set of people.

I also find that I’m consistently coming across new dilemmas about how much or little to share - and there aren’t really any social norms to go by yet! It’s one of the most fascinating things to me about the emergence of social media and I guess that the norms us “early adopters” are discovering in place now may stick around for quite some time.

I think many of us are wondering about the same implications and the reaction I’m seeing more often is people pulling away, being more discretionary. While that’s sensible, I think we lose a lot of the fun and the benefit of having ubiquitous technologies that just work for us. If we have to think about them too much, I feel it defeats the purpose somewhat.

I don’t mean to say that relying on a system implies we stop thinking about the consequences of our acts, but it’s the balance of being confortable enough with the system and aware enough of what your actions mean in the future.

My strategy has been for a while, to use personas. Ok, sorta. I have these prototypical people that represent folks on my list of contacts (representing a biz partner, a colleague, a friend, people I don’t know, etc), and when I post something I imagine them reading it. It’s good enough a filter for me to establish the balance between Ambient Exposure (in my level of comfort with what I present to the world) and Ambient Intimacy (my desire to be social with certain frequency).

While this is a habit for me, I know I don’t do it every time. So when you see me regurgitate 6 messages in a row because I’m running around excited doing something or batch-responding to people, I’ll very likelly be going “oh crap, I just spammed all my followers” and I’ll feel bad. If I share something that I regret, I’ll delete it. The world is forgiving enough - if someone saw it for a split second it doesn’t matter, it won’t haunt me for the rest of my life.

So, while I’m seeing a lot of people pulling away because of these concerns, my idea has been to push those boundaries further for myself (I’m an introvert and I’m shy so this is a good way for me to deal with that in an environment I don’t feel threatened by).

While I was wondering if you had been busy and therefore twittering less, I started twittering more regularly and it has affected my day to day. Because I’m more exposed there, I’ve had more conversations in person at work and with friends and more interesting topics have oppened up. People that were acquaintances have become closer, people who thought I was too much, stopped following. I am really enjoying the experiment.