Identity, contact info, business cards, online vs offline ppl

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 20:21:05 GMT

Noticed a conversation on twitter right now where two acquaintances of mine were talking about exchanging business cards at conferences, both of the dead-tree and vcf varieties. It came as rather a surprise to me that people at tech conferences are still exchanging business cards. Who really does that any more?

When I meet someone interesting in the tech scene for the first time, we essentially exchange URLs, because the vast majority of us seem to have some flavour of website/blog/profile/activity stream that links to most of the other personal information we care to publish. People I'm meeting in a "strictly professional" context get my twitter account. From there they can find my "professional" blog, which directly or indirectly links to GitHub, my résumé, a general idea of where I live (city & country) and my mobile #. Folks I'm more comfortable with probably get a link to this DW account, from whence they can also find flickr, last.fm, and so forth. Details like home phone number and exact physical address get given out on an as-needed basis.

How exactly does this tie in with how we see our own identity? I can't help but wonder if there's some kind of online-persona/offline-persona spectrum going on here, and what kind of identifiers we give people has to do with where we feel we mainly reside. There's a tie-in with wallet names and online handles here too. I think "shadowspar" is a rather puerile and somewhat meaningless handle, but back when I picked it (1999-2000-ish) it was essentially unique. If I tell someone that my nick is "shadowspar", and they feed that into a search engine, pages referencing me are largely what come out.

Dunno where I'm going with all this, it's just...business cards (at least the "traditional" variety, for some value of "traditional") seem to be a link to an offline identity, and just...that's not the world I live in any more.

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