It’s important to know who your friends are.  In the digital age, it can be very hard to tell.

I have a Facebook page.  I have also experimented with MySpace, though these days that’s really a means of keeping tabs on certain musicians and actors whose careers I like to follow. I have an account here on Open Salon. For a while earlier this decade, I had a journal on Diaryland that is now defunct and locked up tight.  When most of my Diaryland friends made the migration to LiveJournal, for reasons not worth mentioning I did not join them.  For a long time I have been a participant in a bulletin board community known as Teh Soapbox, and it’s previous incarnation courtesy of actor Wil Wheaton, The Soapbox.  For a long time after our son was born, my husband and I played the MMPRG game called “City of Heroes” and we both maintain high ranking “alts” proudly in the Stars of Paragon, one of the highest ranking supergroups in the game.

Welcome to the Digital Me.

Identity is a thorny enough process in the real world.  People spend years in therapy trying to answer the question “who am I?”  Great philosophers throughout history have contemplated the question, writing books and books full of answers that mostly leave people confused.  Like anyone else, my relationships with people that I encounter as I move through this planet in the context of my body are complicated.  I am blessed with many friends who love me.  There are people who hate me.  I have done my share of hurting people and screwing up.  I have a marriage and a son, both of whom I love beyond reason, who are the light of my life, and who at times are not happy with me, and who sometimes I wish would just go away.

I have had jobs – lots and lots of jobs – over the course of my nearly 40 years on this planet.  I have been a daughter, a lover, a wife, a mother, a friend, an enemy, a whipping boy, a student, an intern, a lawyer, a consultant, a tarot reader, a shopgirl, a jewelry designer, a recruitment director, a volunteer, a public relations specialist, a living history enthusiast, a historian, a speaker, a teacher, a fall guy, a confidant, a co-conspirator, an instigator, a cheerleader and a host of other things.  Some of them I got paid for, some I didn’t.  Some I enjoyed, some I didn’t.

Living my life in the “real world” and grappling with the higher order questions of identity is hard enough.  Now, however, we all have digital lives too.  And the thing about digital living is that it is even more open ended and confusing than “real” life. After all, “real world” me has some limitations – I have but one body, such as it is.  And while I can change things like my hair color and (with enough work) my weight, and even adopt accents or mannerisms or clothing at my whim, there are certain facts that can never be changed because I am rendered in an earthly shape.  I can only be in one place at a time.  I have no control over the accident of my birth.  The government will always be able to find me because altering certain things like my fingerprints and retinas is prohibitively difficult for average people.  I will die.

Digital me has no limitations except those that I choose.  If I want to build my digital life in the persona of a 13 year old boy, I can.  If I want to pretend that I am a seventy five year old grandmother with a sex addiction, I can do that too.  I could even pretend to be different people in different places, or even more confusing, maintain two separate personas in the same place.  I’ll state for the record right now that I am largely truthful in my digital life, choosing to be who I really am online in almost every venue I participate in, with the obvious exception of City of Heroes, mostly because in the “real world” I can’t just stamp my foot and make stalagmites appear to impale my enemies (but damn that would be cool if I could…).  I may use a screenname in many of these venues, but that is not unusual – after all, plenty of people use “handles” to refer to themselves in the “real world.” We just call them nicknames.

The most important difference, however, is the nature of how real world me and digital me make “friends.” 

In the “real world” I make friends hesitantly.  Indeed there are many, many people in my life who might call me a friend who I consider to be acquaintances.  Not that I am not friendly to people.  I enjoy meeting people and getting to know them.  People matter to me.  I try to be kind to people and treat them with the warmth and respect that I enjoy receiving.  But to me the word “friend” implies an intimacy that I simply do not make available to everyone I meet. My life is a little like an archery target – there are plenty of people whom I like and enjoy in the outer rings of my life.  But to reach the innermost circle, to hit the bulls-eye, your aim must prove relentlessly true, and there are few who actually have what it takes. 

My friends are the people who accept me exactly as I am, even knowing how much of a pain in the ass I can be, who have shown that they will walk beside me when I am in need or in pain, and who will answer the phone at 2 a.m. if I am calling upset and crying.  I reserve the word “friend” for people like these. Other people in my life are “people I know.”  These few are my friends.

I do feel blessed in that I keep my friends for the most part.  There are a few instances where people who were my closest intimates, chosen family, people I had thought were “friends for life” proved not to be.  Some went without a fight, others were painful separations. While it is true that there are friends that you make for a season who fulfill their purpose in your life and then go away, generally speaking those who become chosen family in my life tend to remain that way, even in the years when I freak out, lose my motivation and fail to send Christmas cards.

Once the gloves are off with me, if you are my friend (as opposed to being “someone I know”), as far as I am concerned, there are no lines to be crossed.  You will know my innermost thoughts.  If you want me to, I will tell you the things that I don’t advertise to the world, even the things that would be more properly termed secrets if I was more ashamed of them.* Friends are always welcome in my home and at my table.  I will drop everything to come to the aid of a friend, and will offer whatever is in my power to give that might help.  I will forgive much from a friend – short of betraying my trust or deliberately injuring me, there are few things you could say or do as my friend that I would not try to understand.

But in the digital world, friendship is astonishingly easy to acquire.  On Facebook I have over 90 friends and the tally grows larger every week, and honestly, I’ve only been on the dang thing for a few months.  On Open Salon I have dozens of “friends” that are the people that I have put in my friend list.  I have been added to other people’s friend lists, people who I have no idea who they are consider me their friend.  And the access to information that my friends have, particularly on Facebook, is rather invasive.  They can see all my pictures, see who else is my friend, see all the info I choose to post.  I can communicate with them via writing on my wall (which means all my other “friends” will see it) or by posting a status that tells every single one of my friends what I am doing “right now.”  I mean, how many “real world” friends really have all that information right at their fingertips?

What makes this all the more disconcerting is the fact that while I am mostly honest in what I reveal about Real Me in constructing the Digital Me, that is not to say that I am making a full disclosure.  One thing I have learned (the hard way, which is a post for another time) is that there is a point at which the Information Age can become the Too Much Information Age.  The Internet is public.  And it is forever.  Make no mistake, anything you put out here can be dug up by anyone, and bite you in the ass. 

Because Open Salon is such a friendly space it is easy to forget this.  It is easy to think that you are writing your stories for the hundred or so folks who are “regulars” here in the OS.  But in fact, even from the very beginning, we have always had more folks reading than writing.  We’ve always had “lurkers” who like to read but for one reason or another do not want to write or comment.  And while you need an OS account to post or comment, any old fool can add your latest post to their Facebook page and introduce you to their 200 friends. 

For that reason, there are a lot of things you won’t find me discussing here.  There are parts of my past that have been difficult, relationships that have gone horribly wrong, and pain that I have both received and inflicted.  And I have no need to recount most of it here except in the most generic way because there is always the possibility that those involved in these emotional clusterfucks could find it and all those wounds could be reopened with an added dose of betrayal that comes from posting things in public places. 

There’s also the fact that this medium lends itself to editing.  I am not someone who writes my post directly into the OS interface.  I spend several days writing most of my posts, and I spend considerable time editing them.  I leave things out.  Sometimes it’s because it detracts from the story.  Sometimes it’s because it’s something about me that I’d rather folks not know, personal information that could be used to work injury on me and mine.  Sometimes it’s just stuff that isn’t all that flattering, and there’s no way to twist it around and make it funny or endearing or cool.  The literary equivalent of admitting you pick your nose.  So there’s lots of stuff that y’all don’t know about the Real Me, even though you are “friends” with Digital Me.

That said, the thing I find most intriguing about OS, having participated in plenty of other Internet social exercises, is how quickly some of you have crossed the line, going from being friends with Digital Me to being on your way to being friends with the Real Me. I know I am not alone in this.  I’m still jealous about Lonnie getting to meet Sandra and Mary and Cathy and Joan.  But I have met other OSers, corresponded with even more, and hopefully will meet more of you during Inauguration weekend.  I don’t know how some of you (and you know who you are) did this thing – crawl into my soul the way you have – but I’m very happy to know you.  All of you.

So much for the line between the Digital Me and the Real Me.

* I learned a long time ago that being human is to be imperfect, and that being actually ashamed of something that merely comes as part of the human package is a waste of energy. Regret is so much more reasonable an emotion when you screw up.