A.J. Brush

Who am I right now? Researcher or Mom? Software to support audience segregation

Biography
A.J. Brush is a researcher in the MSR Community Technologies Group. She spends some of her time thinking about uses for social metadata calculated from email and Usenet. She is also somewhat tragically unhip and one of the most compelling social computing applications to her right now is a digital family calendar that would get her scheduling needs under control.

Position Paper
How many email accounts do you have? IM accounts? Perhaps you are like me and have both work and personal email addresses (and maybe a few more too). Or, as danah boyd has written about, several “Fakesters” on Friendster. Goffman wrote about audience segregation in his seminal work “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” describing how we present different performances to different audiences. His observations are equally applicable today to our online interactions. For example, my separate work and personal email accounts help me maintain the roles that seem appropriate in different contexts. Many of my colleagues do something similar for IM. In designing social software we need to support the desire for audience segregation.

Software developers are starting to recognize that people maintain multiple identities. For example, Microsoft recently released Outlook Connector, a plug-in to Outlook that makes it easy to view email from an MSN email account. Personally, the ability to view and maintain awareness of my work and personal email in the same program has been very convenient. However, this step forward is not without snags. In particular, although you can send email from either account, the Outlook Connector interface provides only subtle clues about which account your message will be sent from. While my slip-ups so far have been minor, such as sending email to a family member from my work account, they have been disconcerting. The interface needs to be much more obvious about clearly identifying which account I’m working in to help me manage my roles.

As more and more of our interactions take place online, designers and builders of social software must think about how to better support people trying to manage multiple digital identities, both by providing easy awareness of communication to multiple identities and clear feedback about which identity a person is currently acting in.

Back to Social Computing Symposium 2005