Reading from Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble just now, I came across the following:

Maintaining seperate identity zones is a ritual that helps us deal with the demands of different roles and communities.

Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubbble, Loc. 1610

This is in the context of web personalisation and the competing strands that moticvate different measures of our preferences and marketable interests. Pariser mounts the Facebook 'one identity' notion as having problems when we want to consider how people actually behave. Having different facets to one's identity isn't necessarily a mark of a lack of integrity (except in a very limiting and literal sense) – and, as Pariser points out, most of us find ways to behave differently in different contexts.

This reminded me strongly of my findings when I was working on my Ph.D. in artists' books. There was a strong indication among the artists I worked with, that as well as the technical aspects artists' books made it possible to combine, there was a strong 'affect effect' : it made it possible for them to think of themselves in different ways, of altering the modes of practice they used and thought with. (I.e. as well as the tools of, for example, poet versus printmaker, they get to think like a poet versus a printmaker, and combine both in one medium.) The artists' book becomes a place in the imagination where different aspects of the creative self can come together and exchange ideas and points of view. It helps that it is also well-adapted as a multimedia form so that aspects of the technical and material mingling are a germane part of this. But here the similarity to the filter bubble discussion is in the sense of the book forming a ritual place for exchanges between different roles and communities. (There are also Trickster resonances here, in that the mingling of these streams will often  produce unexpected effects).

There are sites and opportunities for different roles and identities to come together – to bisociate their interests, as Pariser might put it when nhe discusses the roots of cretaivity. We find aspects of our other selves in serendipity, because we happen uppon something that interests us while we are looking for something else. That is, while our intention belongs to the 'self' we adopt in the moment, for a particular search or activity, our 'dormant selves' can be interested in things that come up along the way.

Libraries can offer a kind of world-representing panorama that keeps these waysides open, however partially (in both senses of 'partial', they may be.) Moreover, in surprising us and occasionally confounding us, they provoke not only serendipity, but an awareness of the 'otherness' of human-created information. Other people interpret the meanings you see in front of you. Others have catalogued, decided, inscribed their meanings. They are undoubtedly different from yours in subtle ways, and they may, in your opinion, just be plain wrong. We become more critically aware of other people's part in creating the media we consume when these alarm signals exist (some thing Pariser also mentions). These same alarms can offer a criticl distanciation from media, but they can also offer us material for critical reflection on our own knowledge structures and assumptions – it may, after all, be we who are wrong and not the speaker. When media can be consumed with none of these snags or alarms, when they represent back to us little more than an increasingly smooth mirror of our own opinions and preferences, they deny us the opportunity for both serendipity and critical awareness; further, they narrow the nourishment of the self to that single point of view that is calculated as the median center of our marketable likes and dislikes.