Michael Stephens of Tame the Web has an interesting post entitled The Unintended Consequences of Social Software (or Putting Yourself Out There) It is interesting not just because he links to my family photos under “happy times,” (which is sweet) or because he has nice things to say about the Tutt Library Flickr page that my colleagues and I have set up (which is awesome).

It is especially interesting because this post is an example of what the post is about (how’s that for recursion?): the unintended consequences of living online. I had been fretting a bit about the degree to which I want to keep my private and professional personae separate. But when I see links to my personal photos and my work photos in the same post on someone else’s blog, I realize the cat is already out the bag and anyone who is paying attention can figure out that Flickr’s Hatchibombotar is the same dude working on the other Flickr page for his library.

I suppose the point, for those of us who seem to tend toward a “high degree of self-disclosure” (to borrow a phrase from Michael’s post) is that we need to think about those disclosures before making them, as there is little you can do afterward to “un-disclose.” For me, so far, so good; I’d love for the world to check out the Halloween pics of my boys. But I do worry that I’ll end up disclosing things that could embarrass them when they are older (and yes, I realize that they will find every single photograph of them embarrassing when they hit about 12 years of age. Note to my boys in 2015 when they find this on some post-Google search: tough luck, guys!).

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