I still remember a cartoon the Lampoon published once; it was like a stick of dynamite in my head. It’s one of those things that seems preciously obvious now, even banal, but for every one of us even the most time-worn ideas were sparkling new at one time.

I have no idea who the artist was, other than that her name suggested she was Latina. There’s no way I could dig up a possibly existent copy on the web, so I’ll do my best to describe it. The body of the strip was a large number of small panels, maybe three rows of four or six. Each panel had the same basic setup: there was a small banner at the top, a close-up drawing of the same character’s face and sometimes a small speech balloon in each one. Each banner simply identified a person (mother, priest, boyfriend). The title was something like “How They See Rosie”, and the character was drawn significantly differently, but still roughly recognizable, in each panel.

Like I said, it’s an obvious point: People see us differently, and we present ourselves differently to them, based on the nature of our relationships. It’s the kind of thing that can seem totally revolutionary and right-on to a 16-year-old, though.

And it’s apparently a lesson not learned by the people at Google, as evidenced by the clusterfuck of Buzz.

An email address, I think for most people, serves as a virtual stand-in for the body.[1] It’s more basic than something than an avatar; like the body, it’s the substrate on which avatars can be built. Like the body, we can (and, I think, do) use the same email address to put forward multiple selves to multiple others. We code-switch and choose appropriate topics of discourse effortlessly, thoughtlessly, depending on the correspondent.

A social networking account demands coherence, not the nebulosity of a complete person. This can be mitigated by friending only people who would recognize and accept a circumscribed set of your personae, but still all of your utterances must fall within the area of commonality of all of your contacts.[2] (That users are not able to consistently draw the Venn diagrams before speaking allows for the success of sites like failbooking.)

Google stupidly Did Evil by launching Buzz as opt-out and by auto-subscribing all of the people in a user’s contact list. They set up a situation in which a user could easily, innocently make utterances that would be read by mother, boss, coworker, fuckbuddy, and pal; it is unlikely that there is any intersection that would satisfy the requirements of all listeners, and it is highly likely that simple utterances could unintentionally alienate valued correspondents.

There may be more to come, but I’ll need to set up a few things first. So there probably won’t be more to come after all.

[1] Of course, I’m certain I’m not alone in maintaining multiple accounts for multiple classes of correspondents. There’s the email address that’s used almost solely for resumes, there’s the one I keep for setting up accounts, and there’s the one I use for social purposes. Even doing that, though, there’s inevitably some bleed-through.

[2] This is one of the two big reasons I just don’t care about social networking, why I may remember to log into Facebook once or twice a month and never post any status updates there. It’s not so much that I resent flattening my Whitmanesque vast multitudes into a single, inoffensive yawp; it’s more that it just seems like too much work to write anything that will be both of interest and not off-putting to all of the people I’ve friended.