Are autobiographers surprised when we know a lot about them?

"Dinner's ready" my husband told me. Not by yelling, or sticking his head round into the next room where I was lazily catching up on emails with half an eye on easy-watching TV. No: he Facebook-chatted me.

Quite apart from the alarming alacrity with which I replied (nor come to think of it, the fact that I replied) - such is the ingrained draw of the flashing orange taskbar - it got me thinking: how easily do we communicate across different media? I know at least one person who finds it odd to talk about online posts when in person. Yet at work, it's the norm:
   - Can't get through to someone on the phone? Send an email.
   - Meet a client in person for the first time? Send a follow-up email.
   - Get complex instructions via email? Call / arrange to meet.
We metamorphose into digital beings as and when the professional need arises, but when it comes to friends, it's different?

There's a certain secrecy to online communications. No embarrassment behind the safety of a keyboard. An intimacy from knowing there are no eavesdroppers - or are there? Server logs and supersize inboxes can betray the deepest confidences (long after memory can make any conversation deniable), and social media is more public than an embarrassed whisper in the quiet carriage.

So why do we still insist on allowing more of ourselves online than in the flesh? Why, just when we cannot control the audience, do we fool ourselves into thinking it's only an invited select? Sure, privacy settings help, but it only takes one forward / cut-and-paste to release one's words into the ether.

And why, to go back to my friend who prefers to keep conversations single-channel, do we feel as though we've breached a trust when we force a conversation to cross the great divide? How do authors feel when they're asked about their books, I wonder? Are autobiographers surprised when we know a lot about them?

This brings me back nicely to the title of this post, so here I shall leave you, dear reader. I welcome your thoughts - anonymous or otherwise. :)

Would I have told you all this over coffee, I wonder?