I know this clash you speak of — at times in my past I felt like I was one person at work and another at home, and another with my friends. My biggest merge lately came a few years ago when I told my mother I bought a motorcycle. Not that this is anything too outrageous, but she would have never suspected it, nor would, I suspect, any of my old high school friends.

I agree that there is value in uniting the various sides of our personalities. However, I think there are definitely costs and I worry at times that there will be unknown negative repurcussions to what I do online. Clancy has a good post on what could happen at work — “Bloggers need not apply”

So, when you interact with lots of other people and they lack the intersubjective checks that allow them to decide who you are (e.g., my bowling crew doesn’t consist of any of the people I generally dine with), you are going to have more fractured “identities,” but if your reference group is consistent, your identity will be as well.