changing the rules

It just occurred to me that the trend of transparency is upon us all on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Yelp, and LinkedIn (somewhat), among others. Two weeks ago I separated my "personal" from my "professional" on Facebook, thinking this separation would allow me to use the service a bit better. Plannersphere always wanted to be like a Facebook/LinkedIn child...and so I thought that I could make a Facebook account act like the Plannersphere only with the updates like Twitter - I'm thinking all-in-one baby!

But now that I think about the trend of transparency hitting the social sphere, maybe I shouldn't have done this. Maybe my professional network wants to see my personal life...wait, no, that doesn't sound right. Right? So how are we supposed to function on Facebook when my Director at work can see that I'm "recovering from a hard night out" or that my relationship status went from "in a relationship" to "single?"

This all seems to be about protecting the sancitity of our workplace, but maybe Gen Y is redefining the rules. Everything feels like it's in a state of flux: we're all figuring out how to co-exist with so much information available all the time and we're hitting bumps in the road, trying new things, working it out - but it's thrown us into a completely new area of communication. When I was at MAS, Catrina McAuliffe said that our generation was going to be the one that redefines how we use communication. Wow. She should get a noble prize for forecasting the future....

Here's to hoping that we know what we're doing; and that there's a little bit of strategy and planning along the way to guide us in solving the problems.