Happily offline at the stunning Lapostolle winery in Chile’s Colchagua Valley. More details coming soon (in print :)!

Let me give you a quick peek into a recent conversation between me and my husband:

The scene: We’re watching the Rip Curl Pro Search Somewhere in San Francisco. If we still lived at Ocean Beach, we’d be watching live, but, alas, we have had to settle for a livestream.

The event: Kelly Slater wins (and then officially wins) his 11th ASP World Title. Because I’m a dork, I’m now following Mr. Slater on Twitter, and I’m tempted to congratulate him along with the masses even though the time I’ve clocked actually, technically “surfing” pales in comparison to my husband, who has no such inclination to give an online shout-out.

The conclusion: I think it’s fair to say I’m conducting more and more of my life online, at least when it comes to tweeting my mind, photo sharing, and blogging about our expat adventures and adjustments here in Chile. So, I’m finding it more and more interesting that my husband does not. He doesn’t have a Facebook profile or a Twitter account. He doesn’t tumblr or flickr. He doesn’t hop on a smart phone to check his email or scroll through his friends’ status updates. He might not check his personal email for an entire day at a time!

That isn’t to say he isn’t “techy.” He figured out things on a Mac in a few weeks that I haven’t stumbled upon in all the years I’ve been loyal to the brand. He is also slowly but surely accumulating the gadgetry for an impressive at-home recording studio. And he’s smart about it. He spent a good year researching what speakers to add to the mix, and he can wax poetic about MIDI controllers thanks to his forum trolling. (It should be noted he contributes to several online forums related to his interests, as in his words, “online is mostly about information for me.”)

So, I suppose the key distinction concerns what he projects (or doesn’t rather) in his own image. While there are rumors of a now-defunt MySpace profile, in terms of social media, he just doesn’t feel the need to broadcast in the ways that many of us do. I love this quality of his. Plus, he has me to take care of all that. Poor guy… here he is maintaining a scant-to-low online profile, and I come along and start facebooking and tweeting and blogging all about our lives. While I hope I maintain at least an illusion of privacy when it comes to the nitty-gritty, it’s safe to say his (in)visibility may be a casualty, all be it a willing one, of my propensity to share… and share… and share our goings-on.

So far, this has never caused a scuffle between us. He is supportive of the blog and appreciative when I update our families with pics and posts (and not just because it gives him more time to devote to the MIDI manual :). But it’s completely within his right to veto something I might post (and I ran this one by him before it went live).

One day, we’ll be starting a family, and I wonder how the kid will feel about first- and/or second-hand exposure. He or she won’t even have language for the first few years of these postings, so vetoing won’t be an option. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE seeing all the baby pictures that my friends post online and I have no doubt I’ll be doing the exact same. But if Facebook gets its way, we’ll all be posting our entire lives (and everyone else in them) via their Timeline profile. Who should really make the call on what goes up and when/how it can come down?

Personally, I’m nothing but grateful that Facebook wasn’t around when I was 13 and 16 and 23. Welcoming the global exposure that is social networking into my life around my mid-to-late 20s was just fine, thank you. By then, I had a handle on my relationships and my career. While I trust there are folks much younger than I who are perfectly mature and capable of managing their image, I think we’ve all seen or read those cases where folks (regardless of age) have compromised jobs, friends, and dignity because they just couldn’t keep something to themselves. There have also been those truly tragic cases related to online bullying that make the news with alarming regularity. You can’t see stories like those and think that an “online” life isn’t also a “real” life.

So, I’ll be curious to see what happens to the ratio and overlap of our collective off-and-online lives over the next 5, 10, 15 years. Will we have to worry about and/or edit our profiles as we outgrow various incarnations of our self-image? Will we have to roll our virtual eyes at our parents because they posted those awkward pics of us as we grew up (for the whole world to see!)? Or will we simply not care as much? Will embarrassment and retroactive caution no longer apply in the same ways? Instead, will we treasure this start-to-finish visual history and textual evidence of our existence as modern-day Descartes-ians?

After all, “I Tweet, Therefore I Am,” right? I suppose we’ll have to ask these questions of the next few generations. For now, it’s time to sign off for a little while.