Managing the public - private persona

For many online profiles, it's all beautiful views and stories....

The gap between public and private personae used to be the exclusive concern of entertainers, but now anybody who wants to can live Martin. Plenty of prestige bloggery has been devoted to analyzing the phenomenon of "social-media happiness fraud," which we've somehow elevated to Russian-novel levels of agony: Those people posing in bikinis? Don't feel too envious of them, we've been told, for they are dead inside, too.

Good story from "I am not my Internet Personality" on NYmag.com.

As someone who has been experimenting with publishing actively online for over 10 years now, it's been an interesting/fascinating experience watching my own habits as well as general consensus/trends in managing online personalities. It's still early days, people understanding how public they can be, how secure they are (or are not), what message to sell. Personally, I try to edge as much as I can towards the real reflection, acknowledge some doubts/challenges/etc. but I can also call out that there is some 'massage' of the story going on. Still though, it's only to be expected and I'm sure, for everyone involved, the situation will evolve as we all learn how to manage this new online/offline world that is so heavily linked.