Thanks for your comment.

I think the lines are easier to keep clear in some settings than in others. Your example is a good one, and a case in which I’d say that the lines are a bit easier to draw sometimes. For those of us who work and socialize via the web, often times it is extremely difficult to block one from the other; even worse, as I said, since the age of 24, I cannot think of a single friend I have made that was NOT originally from work (most of them) or online (even my husband). So for me, those two are often impossible not to blend. But there is still a line that you have to be careful of, because crossing it leads to Too Much Information. The trouble is that Too Much Information is often very subjective. For some people (like my husband), sharing ANY information is a huge deal and should only be done sparingly. For me, I’m almost an entirely open book — up to a point, and then I’m nearly 100% private. What’s difficult is knowing where your line is and then learning to read the signs and be sensitive to other people’s.

But, fundamentally, I think that the only way to keep things truly separate is if you keep it ALL truly separate. But that is usually only possible for people who do not use work as a seeding ground for their social life, which I think is getting less and less common with time. I imagine by the time Gen Y reaches their 40s, we’ll have seen almost the total breakdown of a clear work/life division. Mobility in the Information Age makes it very difficult to keep things completely separate, and I don’t think the average person is inclined to see enough benefit in doing it to want to put up the effort.

The lines are indeed blurring on whom we let in our work and social lives and how our friends/employees/contacts/etc share information about us in and across each sphere. Is this the end of privacy? What do you think?