two faced and overbooked

I'm considering creating a new face, and it's stressing me out.

I was once an "early adopter." I mentioned in a recent post that I worked as an intern for There.com one summer; during that time, I crashed into the world of online communication. I was one of the first to join friendster, one of the first mainstream social networking sites, and I even encouraged friends to do the same. I made friends of strangers online through There.com, which I hadn't done since chat rooms in the 90's (with which I had very quickly became tired and wary). I chatted using AIM. I made one special friend in There (we got along so well, and stayed up nights chatting, our avatars touching souls... I can't even write that with a straight face, but it's pretty much a true story) that moved onto AIM, then emails, then a phone call. My best There friend tried unsuccessfully to convince me to move on to myspace, in which I somehow had absolutely no interest. Years later, we reconnected via Facebook. It took years to reconnect because at the close of that Summer of Connectivity--during which I was, for much of the day, paid to be online--I was, for the most part, over online communication beyond email for years.

Now I'm a slow adopter, wary of the ways I know a service will inevitably change my lifestyle. I joined Facebook a little later in the game than most (of my generation). I'm on it now, and it's fun. And stressful.

The stakes are higher now, and there's more responsibility involved. Friends are communicating time-sensitive information, the expectation being that I'll check daily, if not many times a day.  For that very reason, I finally took a big step in arranging for my facebook alerts to be sent to my primary email address from my secondary, spammish address.

Why does Facebook stress me out? Here's why. I still feel as though I'm BAD at Facebook, as if its use is a skill.

Admittance is the first step to recovery, right? Here goes: I love the thrill of being contacted. I love being handed information that's relevant to me, to my friends... And then I know, and I'm over it, and embarrassingly unmotivated to reply or provide my own content. Once in a while I am motivated, and I get feedback, and it's gratifying. I vow to be better at it more often.

[Tangent: Really interesting to consider is the information that we've gained and lost as technology develops. How many people know friends' telephone numbers now that we can rely on our phones to remember them--dial them--without us? (Until, of course, our phones break and we're left with only useless hardware and the realization that, like air, we just might not be able to live without it.)]

My Facebook Dilemma involves a fear of the lack of control over the me content that people have access to. There are control settings, yes, but there politics involved. More on this soon.

Ok. I've done it. There are now two Stefanie Daehler's floating around Facebook, and one of them is the professional me (not yet pictured, but soon to be), the other the more carefree, I can't control my friends' content, me me. The professional me is ambitious--or strives to be--and wants to connect with the community of librarians and teachers and authors and literacy organizations in Facebook existence. Befriend me?

I'll see if, or for how long, I can maintain both faces. Maybe one will overtake the other, devour it, and leave nothing but remnants. We'll see!