My coworker Grace recently blogged about the reality of personal branding on the internet in these, our modern times, citing an MSNBC article about a Cisco interviewee who tweeted about his potential job before it materialized. I couldn’t help but start thinking about the way the internet has changed since I was young, and the inevitable commercialization of it.

When I was young, the internet was virtually unknown. At that time, enterprising geeks networked locally; dialing into BBSes with their low-baud modems and racking up phone bills. Going online involved sending messages to other BBS users, downloading interesting files, and playing mostly text-based BBS games like “Drug Wars”. When you wanted to download files of any appreciable size (say more than a megabyte or so), you started it up when you went to bed and hoped that you weren’t greeted by a “NO CARRIER” message when waking up. Your friends, assuming you had any that weren’t also tethered to their computers after school, got used to busy signals when they tried to reach you. You and your parents reached an understanding - if you pick up the phone and hear weird sounds, hang it up quickly before you screw up my download.

Then the internet penetrated into geek culture - BBSes slowly replaced by local ISPs, small businesses that could outlay the significant capital required to get a decent network connection, who would then sell it to you via a modem. Instead of dialing in to a destination, you connected to a service that made the internet available to you. E-mail was a big revelation around this time, although it seemed like a natural outgrowth of BBS technology. The implications were astounding, largely because the internet at this point was, in some respects, an outgrowth of BBS culture, which was mostly based around shared interests and hobbies. You got to know your fellow BBS members, and even trust them. The culture overlapped with academic circles, universities being the other big presence on the internet. There was an almost communal, instinctive feeling of purpose and identity. Information was now a free-flowing stream, where you could collaborate with almost anyone you liked, assuming they had internet access. Concepts like globalization, now discussed in bestsellers like Friedman’s “The Earth is Flat”, were not unknown, but were still hazy and abstract in popular culture. People were still figuring out how to make money on the internet.

We were still figuring out a lot of things.

It was only natural that the technology would eventually be commonplace. The nature of a global information and communications network is that it eventually eliminates many of the barriers geographic distance imposes, and anything that can be represented as information can exist anywhere, having no physical reality at all. People spend their free time playing WoW, contributing hours, days, weeks, or even months of their waking (and, lest we forget, finite) lives to manipulating bits in a central Blizzard database, and paying Blizzard a monthly fee to do it; analysts crunch spreadsheets to produce forecasts and reports on which huge sums of money pivot; entire companies are born, grow, and die on the premise of manipulating data in their own particular way. Even the money that these activities generate is pure information flow: a database somewhere subtracts some number from some other number; another database somewhere increments, and money is transferred. Our lives are measured now not only by the tangible things we produce and leave behind - families, relationships, physical works - but by the particular way in which our existence perturbs information in a vast global network.

And so, we now have the concept of a personal brand. Since you don’t exist on the internet in any form other than information, you can poke and prod that information in various ways: you can create webpages, blog posts, LinkedIn profiles, Lijit accounts, Twitter streams. You can generate content for someone else, like making a forum post somewhere or commenting on a blog post. Even your social interactions can be quantized, filtered, and monetized. And all of this information comes together in your personal brand, the “internet you”. And since much of this information is interpretive and subjective to recipients, the “internet you” is open to marketing - it becomes less about the information itself, and more about where you put it, how you move it. Is the right person following you on Twitter? How much would it be worth to attract the attention of a big-name blogger like Guy Kawasaki and have him mention you? If a potential employer Googled you, would they find anything untoward?

So, you have to watch yourself. You can’t tweet your impressions about a potential job offer; even on a service like Twitter that ostensibly is about connecting with friends and people you trust, because the information becomes public, becomes part of your personal brand. Content you produce now becomes part of your “permanent record”, but loses context over time. Like sound bites, a poor choice of words or incorrect turn of phrase can be tremendously damaging, perhaps years after the fact. Social networking isn’t about friendship, trust, or the free flow of information: it is networking in the business sense. How many Facebook friends do you have that you would really consider friends? How many people do you know who treat their Facebook friends’ list or Twitter follower list as a scorecard, following random people in the hopes they will follow back and thus add 1 to their score?

I realize I’m not saying anything new. Maybe I’m not saying anything at all; after all, our human desire to understand and ultimately control complex systems extends far beyond concrete examples like the internet.

But as I find myself thinking before I hit the “submit” button on my blog posts or tweets or friend updates about whether the content I’m about to post is potentially damaging to my personal brand, I can’t help but wish, sometimes, that I was connected to a BBS again, waiting - along with everyone else - to discover what I could learn today.