The.American.Word.

We’ve been reading some of the astute comments by Rebecca MacKinnon – former CNN bureau chief in Beijing, fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and co-founder of http://www.globalvoicesonline.org – about Sarah Palin’s fake-name FaceBook account, a violation of the FB user agreement everyone assents to when they set up an account, and a move generally met with instant deletion when discovered.

An unpublished manuscript making its samizdat rounds in DC contains the tidbit, as well as the fake name (Lou Sarah – go figure).

Which raises some questions.

First, is this really a breach, or just a politician living more or less as we all live?

But a quick second: Is the “Sarah Palin” we know and love, hate, or try to ignore, more real or authentic than “Lou Sarah”?

And furthermore: Rebecca MacKinnon, a public figure in Internet policy circles, is on leave from various posts to finish a book right now (her thoughtful blog http://rconversation.blogs.com/ is on haitus, but still a great read even in its archive-edition status).

So we see Rebecca’s thoughts because we’re her FB friends, and they’re great. But we can’t really make them part of a conversation we’d like to share with you – literally you, the reader – because they’re only there to be seem among “friends.”

Rebecca is intentionally diminishing her posture in both the real and the virtual worlds in order to get some work done. Palin is also claiming some private space online, though she simultaneously makes herself ever-more public through her main FB page, her tweets, and more.

What MacKinnon is claiming in sequence – a smaller presence for now in order to finish her book and have a larger one later – is not all that different from what Palin is doing, though Palin is doing it all at once. She’s being both small and large, public and private, with different personas for each stance.

If that’s unattractive, it may be less because she’s dishonest – it’s hard to call a pet-name FB account the province only of scoundrels – but more because she’s impatient and unprepared for serious thinking time away from the spotlight.