Real life doesn’t have friend requests. If it did it would be something like this.

What I’m trying to say, really, is there’s some sort of imaginary line between the digital lives we lead and those in the analog (real) world. The question is; where do we draw that imaginary line?

A while back, I made a mistake – a big mistake. I posted a couple tweets about a friend that weren’t exactly very awesome. It wasn’t that I was mean; it was more that I probably shouldn’t have been throwing this stuff out there. I had no idea this person would ever read them, but this person did. Needless to say, I felt like crap and apologized profusely, but it got me wondering…

In a day where Facebook statuses become motives for murder and hitting ENTER can send a message to all of Tweetdom, how are people really managing the coexistence between their digital and real lives?

I’ve hinted (pretty obviously) before about the lack of adoption by my friends of most social media and Web 2.0 (hate that term) technologies, but what I haven’t really delved into is how they are using the tools they actually do use.

A while back my roommate changed his Facebook status (on accident) to say he was in a relationship. Some of us knew, through actual human interaction, that he was hanging out with this girl. Immediately wall posts and comments on his status appeared from people who probably haven’t even talked to him in months. Eventually things got ironed out, but he had to wade through a lot of Facebook update e-mails to get things quieted down.

I’d imagine that most of my friends hold back when we’re out, worrying that the next stupid thing they do will be broadcast in my blog or caught on Qik, but I realize that part of that is my fault. Should I sit them all down and explain what my intentions are? Should all my friends sign a digital release form?

Thus far I’ve managed to keep most embarrassing things out off of the interwebs, or at least use pseudonyms, but I kind of feel like a fake doing that sometimes. Maybe it’s the journalist in me that keeps wanting to throw everything out there and let the world (wide web) decide what to make of it.
Until I find a definite guideline for how to manage the space where my digital and analog lives intersect, I guess I can only continue doing what I’m doing.

Perhaps, though, if my friends started adapting the same sort of lifestyle there’d be less to worry about. Changing their habits HAS to be easier than changing mine, right?

If you didn’t get the movie quote joke in the title, you should probably not be excited about this . As a note, I’m not into it at all… I just think it’s hilarious they’re making another.