…and remapping the social graph.

I think this tendency to have more diffuse identities or to be at the center (egoistically speaking) or a larger set of independent social networks has much in common with the move from agrarian villages and the modern metropolis. Someone raised in a rural area is likely to go to school with, date, and work with the same social group for much of their life. In the city, you may be a very different person in the office than you are in your neighborhood or in the clubs. The complexity of the physical space of the city allows for barriers between various performances of identity and interactions among reference groups.

and later

This idea of a village within the metropolis isn’t new to blogging: it is sometimes termed a tribe (bund). I think blogging allows for not a “global village” in the McCluhanian sense, but for the emergence of more central identities and social networks that more frequently overlap. Since private, corporate, and public life are increasingly interpenetrated anyway, doesn’t it make sense to look for models and technologies that allow us to work and play better in such an environment?

I’ve long thought that we choose the stereotypes by which we define our own lives from the same menu used by others. So, we are reminded to ask: Are we newfangled people subdividing our lives into more smaller pieces, each aimed at different audience into which we want to blend? If we’re blessed with finite resources, what does further subdivision do to the quality, the depth, and the value of each of our roles?

While it is some folks’ intuition that life today is shallower, that has always been a prevalent intuition ["kids these days..."]. If there really are deep qualitative differences between now and back then, well… all bets are off and history is of little use in knowing what’s coming. But if nothing deep has changed, we should really be asking: Where is the evidence of the many overlapping lives lived by our forebears?