AUSTIN - You need the internet, you love the internet, you hate the internet.

It's a complicated relationship.

Saturday afternoon at SXSW Interactive I found myself popping in several sessions all dealing with how we lead our lives online, either through the information we need and seek out, or the way we connect with others.

And here's the best part # in the end, you, the consumer, the user, the customer, are going to benefit…eventually.

At The Future of Social Networks, strategist and researcher Charlene Li put forward a simple idea # What if our online social networks were as ubiquitous as air? (I thought that would make them…real life?)

Li proposed that while there is a collective spinning of plates when it comes to social networks - different sites, each with different friends, different profiles, different amount of information shared - there was no unifying social network.

"There's one you, but there are many parts of you," she said. "And you don't want to reveal all of that to everyone all the time."

For example - it's not like your information from an Amazon.com profile is accessible on Facebook. The information, and your profile, are in separate places. And in those places you have different lives # who you are (and what you share) on Twitter may be different then who you are on other networks.

This not only leads to schizophrenia, but also just makes things difficult to manage if you want to live that life online.

It is changing, with Open Social, Facebook Connect and other services that aim to share a profile/information over multiple places. And why is it going to happen (though maybe not right away)? Because there is money to be had in it, Li said.

"It's not perfect, but it's not going to get better unless" users and members get involved, she said.

In later session on "Politics, Technology and Pop Culture," the question wasn't so much how you are represented online as how new platforms can change the way we get and dissect information.

Also, it had Obama Girl, so, you know, there was that.

The panel included other media luminaries such as Dan Patterson (of ABC News), Alex Wellen (of CNNPolitics.com) and Lawrence Lessig, to name a few.

While contrasting the ways Generation Y and The Babyboomers take in their information (and what they expect of it), the conversation turned to the familiar argument of "with so many networks and websites…how do you separate the noise from the real signal."

Mark McKinnon, of Public Strategies, said it becomes a distraction to the larger issues. McKinnon pointed to the recent online buzz over whether lawmakers should have been Tweeting during the president's recent address to Congress on the economy.

"Used appropriately it's a great tool," McKinnon said. "The problem is we get into a cycle where more and more people are deluded into the idea that more communication is better communication."

Patterson sees that differently. While covering the Republican National Convention in St. Paul last summer, Patterson said he relied heavily on Twitter to send out and receive information as he was caught among protesters and police.

While imperfect, Twitter is a means of directly connecting people with information as it happens, Patterson said.

"It's about the platform. Those that are creating and those that are consuming" information, he said.

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