Making my Cyborg Self Work for Me

I was very taken with Clive Thompson's essay in April's WIRED, "Advantage: Cyborgs."

I suppose I had launched into every new web endeavor with a sense of reinvention. Not that I was drastically changing my identity each time, mind you, although sometimes I was exploring different themes, and mainly with whole new groups of friends.

So, my concept of myself, as it has been on the web, is an unconnected center with spider-legs radiating out from it.

Now, it seems some bloom is off the rose with social marketing; the days of freewheeling friending are passing. Link-chasing, because someone says so, has lost its luster for me. I am less in awe of all the things I can find and the fact of finding, for instance, related Youtube content keying into the key theme of a friend's blog than more targeted pursuits. I suppose I am no longer game for shoulder-shrugging casual play, as I see what this thing can do.

I recently read Dan Schwabel's Me 2.0, and started thinking about how to take these disparate personae and make myself a more singular, cleaned-up, image.

The idea of being "on message," with the robotic repetition of the same phrases over and over again, does not appeal to me as a multifaceted individual, as a writer, as a funny person, as a problem-solver, as an inventor, as a genius of making-do.

But slowly, I'm bringing things together.