Iconowatch

by Josh Kimball

I committed Twittercide the other day. And while I’m sure it was disappointing to the couple hundred Twitter followers who had gotten used to updates on what I ate for dinner (usually lasagna) or my level of exhaustion (high), I retired my account for many reasons — one of which was the fact that I wasn’t having much fun with that aspect of my identity anymore.

Part of what Iconoculture does is identify consumers’ core motivations and help make those motivations more understandable and actionable. One of the ways we do that is by marking out the broad consumer forces we call macrotrends. Our newest macro, MultiMe, which launches next month, will help dimensionalize consumers’ ability to explore, control and maintain (or even abandon) a multitude of different selves.

Trying on faces, of course, isn’t new. Consumers have played with identity forever — we’re uptight at work and clownish with the crew. What we’ve seen coalesce recently, though, is a convergence of consumers’ identity-related attitudes, abilities and access. Now we have a Facebook identity, a Twitter one, and the old game face for the office. Free-floating personas don’t necessarily mean we’re moving toward a world of more fractured identity, but they do offer a peek at the core identity each one loops back to. So don’t mourn for my fallen Twitter self. There’s plenty more where he came from.