As I was looking through my feeds, I saw this little snippet about online safety being taught to kids by none other than Phineas and Ferb. If you have young kids, you likely know about these two. If you don’t – it’s a kids show on Disney Channel that’s fairly amusing.

I watched the little video and for the most part – I thought it was pretty good. Here are their tips in a nutshell:
1. Be careful what you put online – it never goes away, ever!
2. You never know who’s gonna see it!
3. Just because it’s online, doesn’t mean it’s true!
4. Not everyone is who they say they are!
5. If you wouldn’t do it in person, you shouldn’t do it online!

I’m all good on the tips up to this point, but after that last one, it gets a little iffy…
1. Get off the computer
2. Put down the phone
3. Nothing beats spending time with REAL friends!

That last one irked me a little. Seriously Disney? “Real” friends”? I mean, I see what you’re trying to do here, but could you not have phrased that better?

Anyway, in the light of the recent Facebook commotion, it’s kind of interesting to think about these little rules and how they may apply to all that’s going on there.

As I mentioned previously, on Sunday night I accidentally deleted my twitter account. My personal account – the one I’ve used for years – the one with almost 17,000 tweets under its belt.

When it first happened, I was in complete shock. I didn’t know whether to cry or completely flip out. I was in shock and the only thing I wanted to do was the one thing I couldn’t do  – tweet about what had just happened.  I updated my Facebook page, and started using another account that I’d created previously (the one I was actually *trying* to delete) and started over from scratch. I had no followers and one tweet, and so it began. I went to bed on Sunday night feeling sad, lonely, and angry at myself for not paying closer attention to what I was doing.

On Monday morning I started thinking about how I felt and I realized that the only other time in my life that I felt this way was years ago in Second Life when I’d worked and worked to create a coffee shop where people could meet and be social and I ended up accidentally deleting the entire place with one wrong click of the mouse. I was devastated then and couldn’t comprehend what had happened. It felt just like that.

Then I started to remember something else… it was that moment, that accidental deletion, that made me build a better coffee shop. It made me work harder and I learned more. I made a better space, became more adept and skilled at building, and started working with other people to make new vibrant spaces.  This could be just like that.

Even though my new twitter account has a name that sounds slightly like a potential spammer, friends found me, and new people started to follow. Support requests had been submitted to twitter in the hopes of restoring my account, but with every minute that passed, I cared less and less about having it restored. I was energized, free, and in a position to start over and make this identity whatever I wanted it to be. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was/is to feel that way.

I think that sometimes we get so caught up in our ‘persona’ and what people expect from us that we stop being ourselves or stop remembering who we want to be. I think when you’re always talking with the same group of people in the same space about the same topics, things start to get beaten to death and nothing new ever happens. Starting over with a new identity – perhaps one that’s even more true to yourself than the original identity – is exhilarating. No expectations, no promises, no responsibilities. Free to be whatever you want to be – and that includes… yourself.