There’s a tension between sharing enough of oneself to convey complete, round narratives, and sharing too much: stepping over the line into something uncomfortably open, unnecessarily detailed, or embellished till it’s more icing than cake.

It’s tempting to aim for extremes when we’re communicating personal details, whether that means chatting about ourselves with coworkers over lunch or broadcasting snippets of our lives to strangers from the internet.

There’s something straightforwardly satisfying about being able to say, “I’m an open book, I don’t hold anything back,” or in contrast, “My personal life is no one else’s business.”

The reality, though, is that too much or too little information can diminish one’s message, either by providing insufficient context or by overwhelming signal with noise.

Communication is even more complex in the modern world, as many of our relationships exist and occur across multiple platforms and mediums, which means we use different tools, voices, and implied perspectives when engaging with audiences of folks with whom we may have wildly different comfort zones and dynamics.

This is additionally confounded by the incentives and algorithms that nudge our behaviors on some of these channels: certain types of content (our communications often reduced to that generic, basic unit of social exchange) do better on some networks than others, which further slants our communication styles (often in ad-revenue optimizing directions).

What’s more, some message types and configurations are available on one network, but not on another, so someone who communicates with precision in their length-limited social media writings might ramble endlessly in uncapped-duration videos; all of which can make deciding what to share and what to preserve—what to hold back—a complex juggling act that must be regularly reconfigured to align with these many priorities, systems, and inducements.

Such variables incentivize folks to create versions of themselves that translate well across the diverse platforms on which they participate and engage, and which are appealing to the audiences they’re hoping to attract and communicate with.

These personae, of which most people have several, help determine the nature of the relationships we have in these spaces.

And even if we mostly just show up to these networks to consume—to engage with content created by others—we still produce communicative metrics that ensure we all become curators, storytellers, PR professionals, and members of audiences whether we intend to play these roles or not, because our behaviors and interactions ripple the ether in which we’re consuming.

There was a time when this wasn’t the case, and I think back to the early days of the consumer-grade web and am boggled by how relatively simplistic our first-generation e-communities were.

GeoCities websites and pre-Reddit forums and AIM and even our somewhat-entangled LiveJournals were all fairly basic, with little opportunity to communicate anything but the most overt messages.

But they still pushed us to portray ourselves somewhat or dramatically differently than we would choose to do in our everyday, meatspace lives, and that’s a trend that has in the years since expanded to consume a significant portion of the human population, all of us connected in various ways and shouting all sorts of personal information at each other, whether we mean to or not.

I tend to believe that most of us get more from these connections when we approach them intentionally, rather than being passively, thoughtlessly shaped by the spaces (and e-spaces) in which we spend so much of our time.

Choosing to engage with each other purposefully (one-to-one or one-to-many) and allowing our intended outcomes to shape how we use these tools, these platforms, these entangled dynamics, can help us build right-sized, us-shaped narrative channels, and personae that serve our intended outcomes, while also helping us avoid the extremes of oversharing on one hand, and closing ourselves off from the world on the other.

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