My Audience Is A Many Headed Hydra

I've written about a gazillion times about social broadcasting and the new mores of modern social interaction as well as the changes in the way we view and maintain privacy.  I'm fascinated by the social implications, as well as all of the new technology involved.   I live a discretionary public life.  I say discretionary because I don't tweet about my weight (more than it should be and less than it was, thank you) and if I run into any unfortunate medical issues, I may not go into great detail with my dear readers.  But a lot of what I think and do is out there.  On the internet.  In the clutches of the Google forever and ever.  Obviously. 

Perhaps not obvious to everyone these days is that the primary use of these technologies in the social sense is not, in fact, sharing with your friends and family what you had for lunch (cold pizza and beer, thank you) but information curation.  If I follow you on twitter or Facebook or Google Reader it's probably because you share interesting bits of content from your corner of the internet.  Then again, you might just be a family member or a co-worker or a distant acquaintance.  

Which means that I have to police my broadcasts to suit the individuals in the crowd.  I'm no longer curating my corner of the internet for my audience, my audience is hogtying me because I have no granular control over them.  For example, there are a surprising number of friends and others who would probably find this totally uncouth and politically charged blog post entertaining--but then I'd have to explain to the rest of my audience what "wingnut welfare sugar daddy" means, among other things.  At the same time, there is a whole other subsection of my internet audience who would have thought this was hilarious…but had I just shared it through the normal channels, there'd probably be some awkward moments in my future.

As much as you can--and should--call me out as a pussy ("Share it all and let the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the sky sort 'em out!") for not wanting to offend anyone (too much) the truth remains that none of the major social broadcasting players give us the tools to properly channel our interests to those who are most interested.  There has to be a happy medium between the pure broadcast of twitter and the focused mailing lists everyone was making in the nineties.