The Secret Life of Secrets

Paul wrote a cute piece titled
The Secret Life of Secrets for the latest issue of Ambidextrous that I read today.

In the recording technologies class, we've been focusing largely on legal perspectives and aspects of self-presentation and identity construction on information behavior and privacy. Paul's article, instead, highlights the relational value of secrets. The power of secrets is that they can be shared, but if they are shared with everyone, they lose their cache.

This gets me thinking about the various ways in which I publish semi-passive traces of my digital activities -- for example, facebook news feeds, del.icio.us, and friendfeed. I say semi-passive because when I save things to these various services, I am aware that it is getting posted to a public place and in some cases, that is precisely why I am posting it. But in some cases, I simply want to save the thing for later reference but it isn't worth the complexity to figure out a private way to save it. When I think about these services that publish my traces, I do have an imagined audience of the friends I know subscribe to those feeds or remark on what I do there. But inevitably, unfamiliar people begin to follow the feeds as well and the feeds lose the interpersonal communicative value I once invested them with. When I posted to twitter, I used to know I was posting to Phil, Chris, Chad, Charles, Kenneth, Kevin, and a handful of others. Now I'm posting to them and at least 6 or 7 people I don't know.

And yet, the services that attempt to get around this by letting me add contacts to groups like "friends" and "family" are too rigid. These sets of people I have some shared context with are fairly fluid and often depend on the kind of information that I want to post. And yet picking a unique set of people every time I post an item is also untractable. Livejournal handles this decently well in that it lets me create custom group ("cousins" and "closest friends") for me, and also lets me restrict certain posts as visible only to people I've listed as a friend. Thus, it isn't sufficient for someone to follow me to see posts that I choose to restrict to those I have some awareness of.

This issue seems mostly closely related to the Goffman we've read. Our social interactions are largely made up scripted performances between two individuals, but the personal broadcast model implies unawareness of who your audience is. This seems fundamentally flawed. Most people, I believe, don't care because they operate under security by obscurity and they do not use Web 2.0 services enough to get into these sorts of issues. They put up their photo, share it with a friend, and rarely amass enough data to cause an long-term self-presentation issue. Facebook has, however, engaged the mainstream's anger when they suddenly start included new information in news feeds that was not there before, changing the rules of the self-presentation game. The Beacon and News Feeds were big examples of this.

Thus, it seems there are two aspects to self-presentation in the digital realm: information and audience. And yet, that dualism is also false. Information only gets meaning within a particular audience. Sarcasm, for example, or irony has to be interpreted as such, often in the context of prior knowledge of the ironist.

Many Web 2.0 services separate information and audience into two orthogonal dimensions.
Is this necessarily a flaw? Or does our culture of conspicuous consumption and self-esteem "I'm okay!" actually sit well with the separation of these two domains?