Microblogging, ambient awareness and maintaining weak ties has the sideeffect of making it impossible to move away and “reinvent yourself” as your past will always be with you.
If you don’t “get” Facebook and Twitter, read this NY Times article
The very idea of being limited by the folly of our youth should itself be a sufficient motivator to reinvent ourselves loudly and publicly.
It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already… If anything, it’s identity-constraining now
People in villages change. You can’t get a new bunch of friends to ‘reinvent’ yourself every few months, but then again you are more accountable.
Romanticism, mixed with hatred of the freedom that the city gave us won’t help us understand phenomenons like Facebook. There is a moral panic in some quarters, people worried that your booze party pics of university days will somehow prevent you from getting a real job and becoming a responsible adult. That’s wrong: Facebook and Twitter will simply chronicle the transformation.