There are some of us (late generation-X / early millennial) who saw this coming and still maintain a variety of separate identities across many domains.

I don't know why someone would want to have the same identity in the workplace as on internet forums, for example.

Social media appears to have given many people the idea that they ought to cultivate their public identity from an early age as preparation for internet fame / personal branding.

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pluralmonad 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think this is one reason online anonymity is so important for some of us. It is the thing that let's us tamp down the great unification, at least a little.

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ekabod 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The article explains the distinction between identity and character. You are talking about character.

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giraffe_lady an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you keep them distinct unification is a weapon to be used against you. You're writing your own blackmail someone just has to call you on it.

With prose fingerprinting, sophisticated tracking, now your identities are only separate by rapidly eroding social convention. Intentionally merging them allows you to have control over the process, and helps you maintain discipline about what you reveal where. If you don't do it it will be done to you.

	▲	xyzzy_plugh 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Prose fingerprinting is indeed worrisome, but it's a solvable problem once you are aware it exists. For example, if you contribute here anonymously, but don't contribute elsewhere, there is no corpus that can produce an accurate match. Many people communicate differently in different contexts. It's common to try and match the style of the community in which you participate. I am not convinced that having your identities merged for you is inevitable.

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MithrilTuxedo 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not a neurotypical xenial, but I wasn't any good at compartmentalizing, or when I tried maintaining different identities it didn't feel honest, like I was pretending. I didn't like the thought of anyone ever seeing sides of me that were inconsistent with each other.

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thomastjeffery an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Unfortunately that isn't a solution. When you keep separate identities, the only thing that can exist across platforms is your own participation. Everything you say and do is isolated to whichever identity and platform you are using in that moment. You still don't have the opportunity to exist completely, because your self has been fragmented. Even if you did manage to create a cross-platform identity, the product of your participation is fragmented, and every story you tell is objective to that platform's context. Even if you tell a story that links across platforms, you are still isolated to that specific cross-platform context.

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dontwannahearit an hour ago | parent [-]

I think this misses the point. As the article points out, people could and would act differently in different contexts: Home, the Church, the Bar. They weren't lacking opportunity to "exist completely".

The whole point of the omni-context is that you are putting yourself in a space where you have to act in a way that is appropriate to all of those places.

I would say things in the Bar that I would not want the reverend, my grandmother or my children to hear - but in the uni-context I have to mediate my speech to what is appropriate to all of those audiences or risk judgement for it.

The uni-context discourages expression. It's like a dystopia where everything you say and do is recorded and can be recalled for judgement at any time. And yet people sign up for it.

Trying to maintain separate context, different identities across platforms is an attempt to fight against that and to limit the risk that something I say on one plaform is not going to destroy my social credit in every other platform where I participate.

	▲	Avicebron 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> The uni-context discourages expression. It's like a dystopia where everything you say and do is recorded and can be recalled for judgement at any time. And yet people sign up for it. It's a panopticon, where we self-censor because we fear unknown future reprisals. Did we really sign up for it? Or has Our (collective our) ability to reason and push back against it been curtailed by financial incentives to build it?