The other night, I was walking with some coworkers to an after-work meet up with a bunch of strangers, when I started mentally running through things to talk about.  As I jumped through mental hoops, I remembered a funny, personal thing that had happened earlier in the day, which - metaphorically speaking - stopped me in my tracks.

It wasn't particularly "ha-ha" funny, and it wasn't deeply personal, but I'm sure not going to blog about it here.  Which is exactly the point.

If you're a part of the social web - and you probably are - a lot of what makes you you is essentially available to the world: your likes and dislikes, people you know, places you've been, accomplishments, etc.  And if you're a good citizen of the social web, you likely consider this kind of public knowledge a true and honest extension of who you are as a person.

Thanks to network effect and emerging technologies, our connections are all overlapping and ever-growing, but there are remarkably few barriers to information flow.  So as I recalled my funny personal anecdote, I felt more comfortable telling it to complete strangers than both online and offline friends.

Over the course of the last decade, we've traded our embrace of personal face-to-face connections & digital privacy with public online socialization & in-person anonymity.  Of course, we (mostly) all still desire quality in-person interactions.  And we still love juicy gossip and hearsay online.  (PostSecret is forever.)  But as I watch my cousins (who are siblings) update one another on each others' lives via Facebook wall-to-wall, I start to wonder how close I am to telling the stranger behind me on the line for coffee exactly where I hid the body.