Now more than ever, the Average Joe faces the same problems the Public Personas have always faced, because of social networking websites like Facebook, My Space, Hi5, or Twitter.  Image Management issues.

There will always be many layers of social images we must manage, at work, at play, in our family lives, and with those from our past.  The older we are, more levels of it we must deal with.  The fairly uni-level interactions published on social networking websites force us to confront more varying complexities.

For example, companies want employees to behave in the way that coincide with their goals of public image, regardless of whether the employees are on company time or personal time.  Getting fired for posting humorous clips about your company would be one of those.  Social networking sites give insight to the private lives, (or, rather oversight) to the boss or co-workers.  But I am not just talking about basic faux pas like adding a co-worker or a boss as a friend on Facebook, and then getting caught during work hours, or having boating pictures from that day you took off “sick”.  (Or, this embarrassing bathroom self-photo that got shared all over, of the girl above.)

The fact that the people in our lives are not just all “friends,” create more gray areas that Public Personas have been dealing with all along.

Having a more public role, athletes, actors, TV personas, and other media professionals are familiar with the problems regarding image management and the media. They (or their publicists) often subscribe to a strict usage of their social networking websites, where the greater the number of fans, friends, and/or followers, the more it limits their personal expression.  The limitations may affect those who personify counter-culture or defiance, because that’s an image to uphold, too.

Clearly, the greater the number of people involved, the less the common ground between them, not only in opinions, but also in how appropriately the opinions are expressed.

You can’t always appeal to what’s common to everyone, so why try? When Public Personas attempt to deviate from a strict usage, they are punished by scrutiny, inviting controversy. For example, J.R. Smith’s tweets were recently criticized for possible gang-related messages, in the Denver Post, citing his use of the letter “k” for spelling words with “c” or “ck”.

People are diverted and entertained by flaws or “alarming” behavior. It’s often not even about you. It’s just that when we know someone on a one-dimensional level, it is easier to be entertained by his/her mistakes.  You are more like a caricature in their lives, because there is no humanly possible way to be truly close with everyone.  Just like that, your behavior is up for scrutiny.  The wild picture of you that a friend posted and tagged might not be great for everyone to see.

On top of this, our social lives online give rise to seemingly innocent questions, like,

• Whether to confirm or ignore requests to be fans of companies, websites, or organizations
• Whether to be friends with certain people
• Whether to cuss or use slangs
• Whether to be supporters of certain causes or political stances
• Whether it would cause problems to have too many people know your birthday
• Whether exclusions to invitations to certain events would go unnoticed (or, conversely, why you were not invited to an event that you see pictures from)
• Whether to delete an inappropriate comment by a friend

Basically, the question is how much to reveal, about what. In spite of the promise of easily managing our networks and reconnecting with old friends and associates through the social networking websites, these kind of questions must be navigated through on a regular basis.

The more peripheral or the more varying your actual relationships are within your online social network, the more unwilling you will become in stepping outside of the conforming lines of what is publicly deemed a “responsible” behavior, (however ridiculously converging those lines may be.)

This compounded pressure normally falls on those whose careers are necessarily public.  Unavoidably, this scrutinizing not only shackles those who conform to their fans’ expectations everyday, but also those who conform to the expectations of professionalism, or of friends and family at cost of limiting personal expression, in the semi-public social networking spheres online.

It doesn’t matter whether people are larger than life, or in our lives.  Many people care too much about each other’s “image management” and not enough about just letting each other be a normal human being, flaws and all.  Ironically, this is because we care too much about our own “image management,” since we’re comparing “them” to “ourselves,” after all.

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Update 12/8/09: That said, check out “Funniest FB Snafus“!!