Our internet service has been out for the last couple of days, throwing a brick in the gears of my online reading project and blog posting ability (praise free wireless cafes; curse short battery life). So while un-internetted I wrote this reaction to an event last Wednesday evening:

This past week I met with a number of other bloggers at a Manhattan bar. This was an interesting experience; these people who usually exist simply as a personality expressed through writing are suddenly playing trivia, just a step away. The meeting made me think about the several personalities that operate under the heading of my own name. The "Nathan" emanating from this blog differs from his counterpart on the blog I keep for my company, which, in turn, is different from the personality behind my del.icio.us account or MySpace profile.

On the Web we often live in the illusion that these different selves, which all of us express in varying ways, can remain separate. This is the ideology behind "on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" cartoon - the ideology that has driven much thought on networked interaction in the past. It's the idea that we can erase aspects of identity in the creation of another self. Switching from one self to another becomes an act of continual erasure and creation. This ideology states that once you switch off the computer you are withdrawn from the network.

Yet this couldn't be further from the truth. Our multiple selves overlap, intersect, and interact in ways that are much messier. Erasure is not an acceptable ideology - every interaction, every mouse-click, every blog entry becomes a new piece in our larger distributed, networked identity. Swarming Media's Nathan cannot be separate from the Nathan that wrote his first blog while studying in Scotland, despite the fact that these two selves differ greatly.

So when I met with those bloggers over trivia and beer - which inexplicably came with free pizza - and as they have reported on our get-together, my own networked existence is molded and poked. They add to, and adapt how I exist on the Web and within the greater cultural archive of which we're all a part.