Lately, I've been wondering about the way my "virtual" life overlaps with my "real" life. These thoughts were inspired, in part, but not entirely by some interesting blogging I've been reading: this from Terranova, a blog that looks at the academic side of online culture, and this from our very own Draqq_Zyxorian. It gets me wondering about why I read what I read, why I go where I go, and why I avoid the things I do.

I've always been a blogger, always been a fan of keeping a portion of my soul bared somewhere on the web. I started off at blogspot, where there was never anyone to read my ramblings, so I moved to xanga, where a bunch of my online buddies congregated while not discussing Tolkien rabidly on the forums I was then frequenting. The killing blow for Xanga came when I realized I was too connected. First my college friends turned up, and while there was a certain cameraderie to that, I also had to discontinue using my blog as a venting point for what was happening in my real life. Then people from my hometown started to appear, and horror of horrors, my employer made an appearance.

I became paranoid and carefully protected every entry, allowing only ten of my trusted friends to have access. More and more of my entries were made private, just in case I wanted to discuss anything even one of my very trusted friends wouldn't approve of. Very soon, I might as well have been keeping a written journal. The very allure of blogging was how shockingly exhibitionist it felt, but nobody wants to be an exhibitionist with their grandma in the room-- that sort of display is for strangers. So I very carefully made a new xanga, with a new screen name I'd never used before, with no reference at all to my old site or my real self. I moved my journal over to it and discreetly invited a few of my old friends from the forum to read my new-improved site. I maintained my old xanga with just a shadow of its former entries to keep up the illusion that I was still writing there. All was well.

And then I received a disciplinary action at work. At the time I was working (just over the summer) at a church-based summer camp as a lifeguard and part-time counselor. It was a job I really enjoyed for the contact with the kids, and just the break in regular life. It was like a working vacation. But when I got called into the camp office to discuss my use of inappropriate language on the internet, it was anything but a good dream. The decision had been reached, they told me, not to fire me; but they did want to make clear that this sort of language was unacceptable for one of their staff, in or out of work. My reputation was damaged and I was going to be closely monitored during the remainder of the summer to ensure I wasn't a bad influence on the kids. The entry they referenced was from my new, secret xanga.

I didn't blog much for more than a year. Kept up appearances on my original xanga, and killed the secret site. Then I found GameSpot, a site so niche nobody from my real life will find me here, and so family friendly that I'm not even tempted to get into anything that needs protecting here. This is the perfect fit, challenging my more academic writing and allowing me to build some friendships without feeling that need for overemotional ramblings that pervade networking sites like myspace.com and Facebook.

The point of this longwinded story, of course, is the complete shattering of the illusion that what I do online doesn't matter. There's a common perception that the realm of online is free from interference from the real world, protected somehow. It's Draqq's magic circle working in reverse. We are protected from the inappropriate content of certain games by the closed off and mutually understood nature of play, but where is the return protection my actions in a closed sphere have from my everyday life? Isn't that the way the barrier works? Puppies don't act aggressive with their superiors when they're not playing, but as a logical consequence, they're not disciplined for the agression they've shown in play. Maybe in previous years, before internet access was something everybody's grandma had, this would have been true. Maybe back in the days where IRC and ICQ were the ways you connected, and xanga, myspace, and Facebook had yet to be dreamed up, before MMOs made "out of character" the standard, it would have been possible to have your life online only intrude on reality when you chose for it to do so.

The only spheres where the separation is complete are those where you're all alone. You can't have outside intrusions interfere with your enjoyment of Final Fantasy X--there's no other player there to spill secrets, refuse to cooperate, or report you to your boss. But even in the range of the completely isolated you can't be guaranteed not to have any outside intrusions. Otherwise why did I have to limit myself to my own blog and the blogs of a trusted few friend during the days leading up to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' release? Like most everyone who wanted to experience the book firsthand, I had to seriously limit my online activities to avoid the everpresent spoiler. Even email wasn't safe, and I know Korubi had the ending of the Half-Blood Prince spoiled on the main page of GameSpot's forums. I strenuously avoided all mention of the book on my own blog to avoid drawing stray comments, and limited myself strictly to the sites of those friends I knew were doing the same.

There's no circle that allows me to disconnect from my real life by going online, and no way left to keep my online self protected from encroachment by my real life connections. So how connected is too connected, and what's become of a private space where you can share a bit with friends and know it will end there? And what's to become of these separate circles--or is the line completely blurred?