Vanessa Fox. Nude.

Once upon a time, in a land virtual and secluded, we all went online. And we had the place to ourselves. Never in our wildest dreams did we envision that our moms would follow us on Twitter, or people we met in bars who we gave fake numbers to would friend us on Facebook, or that anyone other than our closest friends would read our rambling thoughts.

So, we explored our new-found anonymity and posted about the mythical archetypes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and flamed each other on Usenet. And what a wonderful world it was. And then our online world, in its pocket of isolation, grew and evolved. Our online lives became intertwined with our the rest of our lives; we shed our anonymity in favor of real relationships and online reputation. And we were joined by the rest of the world, who, through the power of Google, could find out anything about us that we have ever posted in the tiny crevices of the internet. Ah, the future.

At Gnomedex, I led a discussion about how the more you put yourself out there online, the more you may be giving up control of your identity. And it’s not just those who choose to live stream their lives twenty-four hours a day who have to think about how much we give up of the ability to define ourselves to others by putting ourselves out there online and if we’re invaded our neighbor’s privacy by blogging about how he gets the paper in the morning wearing just his underwear and who should have access to pictures of our kids.

I was talking to Stuart Maxwell about this a couple of weeks ago and he likened being a visible blogger to art. Not just to being an artist, but to the art itself. Once you write a poem or paint a picture, the viewers bring their experiences to it and give that piece of art meaning. The artist doesn’t control it anymore. As a blogger, you show whatever slice of yourself you choose, and because you are writing about yourself and your views, it’s not just your words that become the art, it’s your whole identity that people shape and use.

You can become a commodity. You become repurposed as fodder for jokes. A search result. Something to talk about, gossip about. People who don’t know you question your phone purchases, your job choices, your intelligence. And all you wanted to do was hang out with your friends and explain why you fully support Anya’s bunny fear and anyone who doesn’t agree with you can just go back to watching Charmed. (Dammit.)

The day I became set up for a joke and a way for Yahoo to promote its new search suggest feature, I admit that I stopped and evaluated how much I had lost control of my identity online. And how much I wanted to take back and how I might do that. I wondered how I got to a place where my so-called personal life and relationship status were discussed on the official Yahoo search blog.

It was funny. I’m not saying it wasn’t funny. It was just the latest in a long line of events where I wanted to say, as Buffy did to Dracula in the first episode of season five (which I’m sure you all vividly recall), “I’m standing right here!”

Question: Is your life fair game if you put yourself out there? How far is too far?

Someone in the audience said that too far is whatever makes you uncomfortable, and I agree, to a point. The trouble is that comfort levels are different for everyone, and particularly online that can be hard to gauge. Even in my case, it’s not that I felt things had gone to far, it was more the cumulative effect of feeling more like an object than a person. And realizing that I was in a difficult position. If I decided it bothered me, I could stop putting myself out there, which would radically change how I interact with my friends and integral ways I did my job. And I do think that as we move more into an online world, more of our careers will be woven in with our online lives. Even those who don’t have professionally-linked blogs already rely heavily on the professional networking available through sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.

Another person in the audience recounted how an experience caused her to withdraw from online interaction entirely (including deleting her blog), which had a huge effect on how she lived her life.

Before Yahoo started speculating on my relationship status, others were trying to rank for Vanessa Fox nude. You’re reading this blog right now, so you already know how that story ends. I had become a search result and I figured could get offended, ignore it, ask people to stop, or even change the way I interact online. But I decided heck, may as well claim it and get some control. If anyone is going to rank, it may as well be me. And I do. Of course, now it would be nice to rank for something else too, but I’ll take what I can get. Don’t misunderstand. I wasn’t offended at all. Clearly. My site is Vanessa Fox Nude! But who expects to become a search result? (Well, OK, all of us these days.)

Question: How much of yourself do you put out there? Do you edit yourself? Are you being truly authentic?

We talked quite a bit about this. I said that I do carefully think about what I put out there. The exception, I suppose, being this blog post. (The irony!) Someone else mentioned later in a blog post that it’s more difficult to deal with what you put out there before, in that once upon a time land when you never dreamed everyone you know would one day be online with you and that Google would exist to help everyone find everything you’ve ever written.

There’s all this talk of authenticity in blogging, but can anonymous bloggers actually be more authentic than those who are up front about who they are? Online maybe. But you lose the more personal connections, the social interaction, particularly if you want to extend your online relationships into the rest of your life.

By putting yourself out there, people can criticize what you write, sure. But they can also talk about your stupid hair or your stupid voice (if you podcast too) or your unhealthy obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as though there’s any such thing!).

But again, one thing mentioned a lot by the audience is that you can at least partially control this by making it your own and using it to your own purposes. Write a blog post about it; acknowledge it; use it. Of course, you can also exert some control by deciding what you want to ignore. Often, people don’t know you — they just see this small slice that you choose to expose. You can take criticism to heart, learn from it, but also weigh when it’s valid and useful.

The flip side, of course, is what do you do with the praise? If you choose to disregard anything negative, can you really choose to believe just the positive stuff? Well, hell yeah! Or perhaps you try to weigh it all equally. Some criticism is valid; some praise is valid. But you can’t get obsessed with taking things too personally or you’ll drive yourself crazy.

So you can control what you choose to talk about, you can control how you choose to react to how you’re perceived. As Jason Calacanis noted, you can choose to have comments on your blog or not. He got a lot of heat for choosing to turn them off (and maybe he did it more so people who would ordinarily comment would instead blog, which gives him both links and publicity, but his point still stands — you should be able to choose how much you want to open your self up to discussion on your own site). Ronni Bennet mentioned that she chooses her associations with care because she knows it impacts how she’s perceived. She was active in BlogHer until she noticed that she was beginning to be perceived as a blogger for older women rather than for older people. She’s taking an active role in controlling her image online.

Question: But what about when you secretly record your fiance’s reaction to your public proposal and put it on iFilm?

Before I spoke, Justin of justin.tv was talking about recording his life 24 hours a day. That’s fine for him, but, the audience wondered, what about everyone Justin comes in contact with? They aren’t choosing to live stream themselves on the internet. Most of us don’t have that issue to figure out, but when we talk about our own lives, we talk about our friends’ lives, our spouse’s life, our kids. And they aren’t necessarily choosing to reveal themselves like that.

I brought up Rand’s very public proposal and subsequent acceptance not to pick on him (I thought the whole thing was very sweet), but because it’s a classic love story! Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy blogs about his love; ultimately shows proposal on internet. OK, maybe not a classic love story, but classic blogging problem, right? When you share your life on the internet, do you edit that to avoid sharing the lives of those around you?

The audience talked a bit out how much they share about children. Some people said they don’t post pictures of their kids online because the kids are too young to decide whether or not they are OK with it. Other people said their kids are a big part of their life and of course they share that. Certainly everyone didn’t come to an agreement, and I don’t think the questions we discussed really have one set answer.

Controlling your life online isn’t about a set of guidelines for everyone to follow. It’s about being aware of where you might be giving up control and making conscious decisions.

Question: But what if by putting yourself out there, you find that means people randomly take pictures of the back of your head, potentially doing tequila shots?

Hell, you get a blog post out of it! Which was another point the audience kept coming back to. How can you turn things around and use them to your benefit? Many times, you can take some control just by deciding how you want to react.

And what about those people talking about your Buffy love and taking pictures of your bad haircut and watching your girlfriend’s proposal reaction? As we move more and more to an integrated online/offline world and we decide how to integrate the two and how much to keep them separate, we run into this disconnect in that the rules are different online and offline. How can we make our offline world work with online rules?

Take for instance, Facebook. Why have you said that I’m your friend when I don’t know you? Offline, this doesn’t make much sense, right? But online, we want very much for people we don’t know to come read our blogs and subscribe to our RSS feed, and we get into intense discussions with strangers on forums. It makes perfect sense to use Facebook to build a community with these people. Maybe. Facebook is one of those platforms that is trying to merge online and offline life, but for people who are used to keeping them entirely separate with entirely different rules, it’s a little jarring. Again, we all have to decide for ourselves how we want to use these platforms.

If you think of your blog as a way to get your ideas out there and you think of Twitter as a way to let your friends know where you are, then you may indeed think it’s great that you have hundreds of RSS subscribers, yet odd you have that many Twitter followers. But how we use a platform may not be how others use a platform. An RSS subscriber may follow you on Twitter to get some bonus blogging tidbits. (You really only need to worry if those same subscribers realize if they peek into the windows of your house, they can get even more tidbits.) Sure some of this would be fixed with better permission management online, and maybe that’s the way things are going. For your house, I suggest curtains.

There are other offline consequences right? Your started your blog to talk to other techie geeks, but then your mom starts commenting. You give someone a fake number at a bar (erm, not that I would, I’m talking hypothetically here!) and since they’re in your regional Facebook network, they just hop online and grab the real one.

Really though, the important thing is to decide how you want to use the online tools, how you want to integrate that with the rest of your life, and to know that everyone else is deciding this for themselves as well and may decide differently than you.

I talked to several people, particularly after the session, who said that they keep an anonymous presence online. Are we coming full circle back to the days when the beauty of the web was its anonymity? Some people are doing both. They have a presence under their real names and a separate anonymous one. And that works for some people, but it also means they’re managing multiple identities, including their offline one. And what about your online professional presence and personal presence? How many identities can you manage before you simply go completely insane and end up like Buffy in that one episode when she was in that straight jacket and she decided she had to kill off all of her friends. One hopes you would metaphorically kill them off by deleting your Facebook profile and not trap them all in a basement like Buffy did.

So mostly my presentation was full of lots of questions:

• What do you put online?
• What does your online presence mean for those around you?
• What about anonymity?
• Do you keep separate personas (online, offline, professional, personal) or merge it all into one life?
• What is the future of the web: Do we become commodities or can we control how we’re used?

I didn’t come to the session with the answers. And it was great exploring the questions with everyone during the session and after in the halls and the parties.

So Stuart offered himself up for brainstorming and coffee, Natala put together kick ass slides, and the audience jumped in with really great discussion. Mostly I just stood behind the podium and soaked up the information.