This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Andy Oram
December 16, 2009
To be or not to be: that is the question.
Hamlet’s famous utterance plays a trick on theater-goers, a mind game of the same type he inflicted constantly on his family and his court. While Although diverting his audience’s attention with a seemingly simple choice between being and non-being, Hamlet of all people would know very well how these extremes bracket infinite gradations.
Our fascination with Hamlet is precisely his instinct for presenting a different self to almost everyone he met. Scholars have been arguing for four hundred years about Hamlet’s moral compass, whether his feigned insanity masked a true mental illness, whether the suffering and death he inflicted on those around him was a deliberate strategy, what psychological complexes fueled his cruel excoriation of Ophelia, and other dilemmas that come down to questions about his identity.
We can appreciate, therefore, why actors up to the present day have to memorize Hamlet’s "Speak the speech" passage. As a thespian, Hamlet outshown all the Players.
We can bring this critical perspective on identity into our own 21st-century lives as we populate social networks and join online forums. When people ask who we are, questions multiply far beyond the capacity of a binary "to be" digit.
No matter how candidly we flesh out our digital representations online, they remain skin-deep. They can never reflect how we are known to our families, neighbors, and workmates. Even if we stole a vision from science fiction and preserved a complete scan of our brains, the resulting representations would not be able to demonstrate the dexterity we’ve built by playing basketball every Saturday, or show the struggles we have to control Tourette’s syndrome.
I don’t believe anybody has tied down the meaning of online presence, and I don’t presume to do so here. But we may find better resolutions to some of the everyday dilemmas we face by exploring, over the course of this article, facets of self that have been discovered and debated in the age of computers.
Before widespread participation in Web 2.0-style forums, the question of online identity was framed as an issue of privacy under assault by large institutions. Only governments and major corporations could install and program the mainframe computers that stored the digital evidence of our identities. Within that framework, starting in the 1970s, European countries that were still shadowed by the history of Nazi round-ups started to limit the sharing of personal information gathered during commerce and other transactions.
But at the same time that these laws, enshrined in a 1995 Data Protection Directive and further extended to transactions that the EU carries out with other countries, set a standard for the regulation of commercial data collection, these same European governments have also, ironically, unleashed surveillance in response to the terror that hit them during this decade. Internet providers are required to retain information about the connections made by their customers for periods of time ranging from six months to many years. London has led the world in putting up more than one million surveillance cameras—which helped to identify the 2005 Underground bombings—and yet, according to the BBC, has fewer cameras per capita than many other cities.
To faceless spies and intrepid marketers, our identity is defined by the web site we just visited about surveillance cameras, the tube of spermicidal jelly we bought on vacation in Florida, or other odds and ends that allow them to differentiate us from other people with similar ordinary profiles. The result may be a knock on the door from Interpol or just a targeted ad for romantic getaways.
But in the age of social networks and Web 2.0, we become the agents of our own undoing. And therefore, discussions about identity must be fashioned with a subtler clay. At every juncture—morning, noon and night—we redefine our own identities.
Should we post our age and marital status? Should we make our profile private or public? Should we reveal that we’re gay? (Data-crawling programs can make a pretty good guess about it even if we don’t.) Should we boast on Twitter that we applied for a grant? Should we talk about the ravages of chronic Crohn’s disease? This article will lead its readers, hopefully, to a fruitful way of thinking about these choices.
Next, what about the elements of our identity that are controlled less by us than by other random individuals? Should we ask that freshman to take down the photo he posted where we lay passed out at a party? Should we respond to the blogger who mangled the facts during a blustering attack on our latest political activity?
And the ultimate arbiter of identity: what turns up when people search for us? Yes, our selves are all in the hands of Google (and for the most wretched of all—the famous—Wikipedia). Admitting its hegemony over identity, Google now lets us store our own profiles to be served up when people search for us. They also reveal (at least some of) how they’re tracking us at a service called Dashboard. As we’ll see, social networking allows us more control over the image we present—at the cost of entering discussions that are not of our choosing.
This posting was stimulated by the enormous growth in social networking over the past twelve months. Truly, it is the Internet phenomenon of the year and deserves an end-of-the-year profile. In a recent 19-month period, Facebook rose from 75 million to 300 million members, and Twitter has gone from perhaps 1.3 million users (depending on how you count them) to an estimated 18 million. This posting will be followed by seven more on this site, covering identity and anonymity from a variety of viewpoints.
Not only have the sites dedicated to social networking swollen voluminously, but their techniques have been watched carefully by others. Analysts advise corporations that, to maintain their customer bases, it’s not enough to offer a good product, not enough to market it adeptly and back it up with good service, not enough even to invite comments and customer reviews on popular web sites—no, the corporation must build community. They have to entice customers to socialize and come to feel that they’re part of a common mission—a mission xcentered on the corporation.
Increasingly, the forward march of social networking can be seen on site for other services and organizations. It inspires things as trivial as visitor pictures and profiles, or as complex as mechanisms for encouraging visitors to sign up more recruits, mark other members of the site as friends, form affinity groups, post content, and compete for points that harbor some promise of future value.
Although I’d like to drop in to buy a cup of coffee or a shirt without social networking, and many of the ground-breaking techniques for building community turn into gimmicks when reduced too crassly to attention-getting techniques, I think this trend is beneficial. People are more effective when they know each other better. And the basis for knowing each other will be found in personal and group identity.
The sections of this article are:
But he that writes of you, if he can tell
that you are you, so dignifies his story.
Long before the Internet, much of our private lives were available to those who took an interest, and not just if we were a celebrity chased by paparazzi or a lifelong resident of a small village. Investigators with many good reasons for ferreting out such knowledge—non-profit organizations, college development offices, law enforcement professionals, private detectives—pursued their quarries with incredibly sophisticated strategies for uncovering as much information as they could and shrewdly deducing even more. The Internet has simply infused these methods with new ingredients.
For background, I interviewed a development professional at a private college. The goal of such professionals is to deduce a person’s ability to contribute, using publicly available information such as purchases and sales of land, marriage and divorce records, and stock prices for the companies in which prospects hold leading positions. A few golden sources exist for tracking the most attractive fundraising candidates:
Publicly traded companies reveal the compensation (salary, bonuses, and stock) of their five highest paid employees.
Law journals report the compensation of the partners at the top 200 law firms.
Foundations owned by prospective donors file public reports, as Series 990 tax forms, listing the foundation’s assets and donations.
Salaries of public officials are open records.
More generally, Lexis-Nexis offers easy and powerful searches on articles from which development professionals can glean valuable biographical information and indications of how well the prospects’ companies are faring.
If your name is John Smith or Ali Khan, you may be a bit hard to track over the decades. But casual details such as place of residence or number of children can allow the development staff to piece together information sources. If you provide the alumni office with even one or two scraps of such information, you help snap the connecting rods in place.
The Internet has sprung upon the development field like a geyser—with particularly rich pools of information in Zillow.com’s real estate listings, corporate biography sites, and donor lists for philanthropic organizations—while the new social networks make fund-raising professionals even giddier. For instance, social network traffic makes it much easier for development offices to keep track of alumni’s family members, which offer indications of their financial means. Weblogs where a prospective donor trumpets his or her passions can help shape the right appeal to loosen the purse strings.
If any of this has made you nervous, let me stake out the position that legitimate development research is crucial for social progress. Colleges and non-profits depend on the donations of those fortunate enough to have disposable income. People whose incomes render them subjects of this sort of tracking know the score; dealing with fund-raisers is just part of the responsibility of wealth management. And the fund-raisers have high professional standards, such as the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement’s statement of ethics.
The general population is less well informed than the rich about the public aspects of their private lives, which is why I’ve chosen this section to begin my survey of identity. I myself run into surprise from ordinary citizens I call up when I’m volunteering for a political campaign and trying to mobilize potential supporters. Some people express annoyance that I know they voted in a Democratic or Republican primary. Indeed, although their choice of candidate on the ballot is a secret, the fact that they voted on that ballot is public information. (Forty-eight states in the US provide it to anybody who asks, while the other two have ways of getting it less directly.)
Democracy relies the use of voter rolls by campaign workers like me to reach out to our neighbors, drum up the vote, and convey our message. The extensive time we put into these pursuits is one of the few counterbalances to the dominance of TV and radio ads in determining public opinion. Those who don’t understand the value of open records in voting might be even more upset to know that anyone can easily find out what candidates they gave money to, and how much. But get used to it: your actions matter to society, and our right to know often trumps your right to be left alone.
Of course, I haven’t recounted the ways banks, retail chains, and insurance companies track us; we’re all aware of it. A section of this article is devoted to the slice of this activity that makes up behavioral advertising online. When WIRED journalist Evan Ratliff gave a up month of his life to be voluntarily hunted, ditching his identity and trying to hide behind a new one, he discovered that savvy investigators, working with cooperating vendors but with no help from law enforcement, could decipher when and where he got money from ATMs, made routine purchases, and arranged air flights.
Ultimately, you can be most reliably identified through your DNA, but the methodology and data are usually available only to law enforcement. The police used to trace you through fingerprints, but we’ve learned over the decades how unreliable those are. So DNA is the gold standard for identity.
The British police have been using any excuse to take a DNA sample from everyone they come across. Recently, upon being told by the European Court of Human Rights that preserving samples for indefinite lengths of time were a violation of privacy, the police grudgingly agreed to destroy the samples taken from innocent people after six years.
In many British localities—and a number of American ones as well—your identity is extended to include your automobile. These are areas where governments have installed cameras to capture license plates, and where the traffic ticket will come to you if some other person driving your car goes through a red light or exceeds the speed limit.
To the security system at your workplace, you may be your key card, or the numeric code you enter on a touchpad, or your facial bone structure or iris image. Security experts like to distinguish three kind of identifying traits that correspond to these security checks: something you possess, something you know, and something you are.
Even anonymized data such as census figures can be associated with individuals through a little—surprisingly little—bit of additional information. In the most famous and dramatic demonstration of the power of joined data, a Carnegie Mellon student obtained the health records of a public figure simply by combining publicly available information. Such exploits are fodder more for identity thieves than for fund-raisers or advertisers, but they show how exposed you can become when tiny pieces of your life float around on public sites. The Internet provides an enormous, integrated platform for retrieving identities.
The next section of this article, turning to our presence on the Internet itself, reduces our focus to the minimal data technically available on the Internet. As we’ll see, while it restricts what web servers know about us, it compensates by providing immediate, dynamic exploitation of that information.
What men daily do, not knowing what they do!
The previous section of this article explored the various identifies that track you in real life. Now we can look at the traits that constitute your identity online. A little case study may show how fluid these are.
One day I drove from the Boston area a hundred miles west and logged into the wireless network provided by an Amherst coffee shop in Western Massachusetts. I visited the Yahoo! home page and noticed that I was being served news headlines from my home town. This was a bit disconcerting because I had a Yahoo! account but I wasn’t logged into it. Clearly, Yahoo! still knew quite a bit about me, thanks to a cookie it had placed on my browser from previous visits.
A cookie, in generic computer jargon, is a small piece of data that a program leaves on a system as a marker. The cookie has a special meaning that only the program understands, and can be retrieved later by the program to recall what was done earlier on the system. Browsers allow web sites to leave cookies, and preserve security by serving each cookie only to the web site that left it (we’ll see in a later section how this limitation can be subverted by data gatherers).
Among the ads I saw was one for the local newspaper in my town. Technically, it would be possible Yahoo! to pass my name to the newspaper so it could check whether I was already a subscriber. However, the Yahoo! privacy policy promises not to do this and I’m sure they don’t.
As an experiment, I removed the Yahoo! cookie (it’s easy to do if you hunt around in your browser’s Options or Preferences menu) and revisited the Yahoo! home page. This time, news headlines for Western Massachusetts were displayed. Yahoo! had no idea who I was, but knew I was logging in from an Internet service provider (ISP) in or near Amherst.
What Yahoo! had on me was a minimal Internet identity: an IP address provided by the Internet Protocol. These addresses, which usually appear in human-readable form as four numbers like 150.0.20.1, bear no intrinsic geographic association. But they are handed out in a hierarchical fashion, which allows a pretty good match-up with location. At the top of the address allocation system stand five registries that cover areas the size of continents. These give out huge blocks of addresses to smaller regions, which further subdivide the blocks of addresses and give them out on a smaller and smaller scale, until local organizations get ranges of addresses for their own use.
Yahoo! simply had to look up the ISP associated with my particular IP address to determine I was in Western Massachusetts. But the technology is a bit more complicated than that. I was actually associated with three IP addresses—a complexity that shows how the fuzziness of identity on the Internet extends even to the lowest technological levels.
First, when I logged in to the coffee shop’s wireless hub, it gave me a randomly chosen IP address that was meaningful only on its own local network. In other words, this IP address could be used only by the hub and anyone logged in to the hub.
The hub used an aged but still vigorous technology known as Network Address Translation to send data from my system out to its ISP. As my traffic emanated from the coffee shop, it bore a new address associated with the coffee shop’s wireless hub, not with me personally. All the people in the coffee shop can share a single address, because the hub associates other unique identifiers—port numbers—with our different streams of traffic.
But the ISP treats the coffee shop as the coffee shop treats me. The coffee shop’s own address is itself a temporary address that is meaningful to the local network run by the ISP. A second translation occurs to give my traffic an identity associated with the ISP. This third address, finally, is meaningful on a world scale. It is the only one of the three addresses seen by Yahoo!.
However, an investigator (hopefully after getting a subpoena) could ask an ISP for the identity of any of its customers, submitting the global IP address and port numbers along with the date and time of access. The coffee shop didn’t require any personal information before logging me in and therefore could not fulfill an investigator’s request, but a person doing illegal file transfers or other socially disapproved activity from a home or office would be known to the hub system and could therefore by identified—so long as logfiles with this information had not been deleted from the hub.
The combination of IP address, port numbers, and date and time allows the Recording Industry Association of America to catch people who offer copyrighted music without authorization. And this technological mechanism underlies the European Union requirement for ISPs to keep the information they log about customer use, as mentioned in the first section of this article.
If I want to hide this minimal Internet identity—the IP address—I have to use another Internet account as a proxy. In the case of my visit to Western Massachusetts, I was protected by logging in anonymously to a coffee shop, but in some countries I’d be required to use a credit card to gain access, and therefore to bind all my web surfing to a strong real-world identity. Many European countries require this form of identification, outlawing open wireless networks.
To generalize from my Amherst experiment, the information we provide as we use the Internet is very limited, and can be limited even further through simple measures such as removing cookies (a topic covered further in a later section of this article). But what the Internet still allows can be used in a supple manner to respond instantly with ads and other material—such as the nearest coffee shop or geographically relevant weather reports—that are hopefully of greater value than the corresponding material in print publications we peruse.
This section has explored the use of IP addresses metaphorically, as well as illustratively, to show how our Internet identity is context-sensitive and can change utterly from one setting to another. Usually, we provide more of a handle to the people we communicate with over email, instant messaging, forums, and so forth. Here too we have multiple identities and spend hours collecting each other’s handles.
Email, the oldest form of personal online communication, ironically has one of the better hacks for combining identities. You email accounts can be set up to forward mail, so that mail to the address you kept from your alma mater goes automatically to your work address.
In contrast, you can’t use your AIM instant message account to contact someone on MSN, so you need a separate account on each IM service and no one will know they all represent you unless you tell them. Twitter is experimenting with ways to assure users that accounts with well-known names are truly associated with the people after which they’re named.
If IM services all agreed to use XMPP (or some other protocol) you could reduce all your IM accounts to one. And if every social network supported OpenSocial, you could do a lot of networking while maintaining an account on just one service.
A widely adopted protocol called OpenID allows one identity to support another: if you have an account on Yahoo! or Blogger you can use it to back up your assertion of identity on another site that accepts their OpenID tokens. OpenID and related technologies such as Information Card don’t validate your existence or authenticate the personal traits you have outside the Internet, but allow the identity you’ve built up on one site to be transferable.
The next section shows how our the minimal elements of online identity have been expanded by advertisers and other companies, who combine the various retrievable polyps of our identity. Following that, we’ll see how we ourselves manipulate our identities and forge new ones.
Thy self thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing
Voracious data foraging leads advertisers along two paths. One of their aims is to differentiate you from other people. If vendors know what condiments you put in your lunch or what material you like your boots made from, they can pinpoint their ads and promotions more precisely at you. That’s why they love it when you volunteer that information on your blog or social network, just as do the college development staff we examined before.
The companies’ second aim is to insert you into a group of people for which they can design a unified marketing campaign. That is, in addition to differentiation, they want demographics.
The first aim, differentiation, is fairly easy to understand. Imagine you are browsing web sites about colic. An observer (and I’ll discuss in a moment how observations take place) can file away the reasonable deduction that there is a baby in your life, and can load your browser window with ads for diapers and formula. This is called behavioral advertising.
Since behavioral advertising is normally a pretty smooth operator, you may find it fun to try a little experiment that could lift the curtain on it bit. Hand your computer over for a few hours to a friend or family member who differs from you a great deal in interests, age, gender, or other traits. (Choose somebody you trust, of course.) Let him or her browse the web and carry on his or her normal business. When you return and resume your own regular activities, check the ads in your browser windows, which will probably take on a slant you never saw before. Of course, the marketers reading this article will be annoyed that I asked you to pollute their data this way.
Experiences like this might arouse you to be conscious of every online twitch and scratch, just as you may feel in real life in the presence of a security guard whose suspicion you’ve aroused, or when on stage, or just being a normal teenager. Online, paranoia is level-headedness. Someone indeed is collecting everything they can about you: the amount of time you spend on one page before moving on to the next, the links you click on, the search terms you enter. But it’s all being collected by a computer, and no human eyes are ever likely to gaze upon it.
Your identity in the computerized eyes of the advertiser is a strange pastiche of events from your past. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, Google’s Dashboard lets you see what Google knows about you, and even remove items—an impressive concession for a company that has mastered better than any other how to collect information on casual Web users and build a business on it. Of course, you have to establish an identity with them before you can check what they know about your identity. This is not the last irony we’ll encounter when exploring identity.
But advertisers do more than direct targeting, and I actually find the other path their tracking takes—demographic analysis—more problematic. Let’s return to the colicky baby example. Advertisers add you to their collection of known (or assumed) baby caretakers and tag your record with related information to help them understand the general category of "baby care." Anything they know about your age, income, and other traits helps them understand modern parenting.
As I wrote more than a decade ago, this kind of data mining typecasts us and encourages us to head down well-worn paths. Unlike differentiation, demographics affect you whether or not you play the game. Even if you don’t go online, the activities of other people like you determine how companies judge your needs.
The latest stage in the evolution of demographic data mining is sentiment analysis, which trawls through social networking messages to measure the pulse of the public on some issue chosen by the researcher. A crude application of sentiment analysis is to search for "love" or "hate" followed by a product trademark, but the natural language processing can become amazingly subtle. Once the data is parsed, companies can track, for instance, the immediate reaction to a product release, and then how that reaction changed after a review or ad was widely disseminated. Results affect not only advertising but product development.
Once again, my reaction to sentiment analysis mixes respect for its technical sophistication with worries about what it does to our independence. If you add your voice to the Twittersphere, it may be used by people you’ll never know to draw far-reaching conclusions. On the other hand, if you refuse to participate, your opinion will be lost.
Google’s Dashboard tells you only what they preserve on you personally, not the aggregated statistics they calculate that presumably include anonymous browsing. But you can peek at those as well, and carry on some rough sentiment analysis of your own, through Google Trends.
Considering all this demographic analysis (behavioral, sentiment, and other) catapults me into a bit of a 21st-century-style existential crisis. If a marketer is able to combine facts about my age, income, place of birth, and purchases to accurately predict that I’ll want a particular song or piece of clothing, how can I flaunt my identity as an autonomous individual?
Perhaps we should resolve to face the brave new world stoically and help the companies pursue their goals. Social networking sites are developing APIs and standards that allow you to copy information easily between them. For instance, there are sites that let you simultaneously post the same message instantly to both Twitter and Facebook. I think we should all step up and use these services. After all, if your off-the-cuff Tweet about your skis from the lounge of a ski resort goes into planning a multimillion dollar campaign, wouldn’t it be irresponsible to send the advertiser mixed messages?
My call to action sounds silly, of course, because the data gathering and analysis will obviously not be swayed by a single Tweet. In fact, sophisticated forms of data mining depend on the recent upsurge of new members onto the forums where the information is collected. The volume of status messages has to be so high that idiosyncrasies get ironed out. And companies must also trust that the margin of error caused by malicious competitors or other actors will be negligible.
We saw in an earlier section that your online presence is signaled by a slim swath of information. At the low end, marketers know only your approximate location through your IP address. At the other extreme they can feast on the data provided by someone who not only logs into a site—creating a persistent identity—but fills out a form with demographic information (which the vendor hopes is truthful).
As another example of modern data-driven advertising, Facebook delivers ads to you based on the information you enter there, such as age and marital status. A tech journal reported that the Google Droid phone combines contacts from many sources, but I haven’t experienced this on my Droid and I don’t see technically how it could be done.
Most browsing takes place in an identity zone lying between the IP address and the filled-out profile. We saw this zone in my earlier example from the coffee shop. The visitor does not identify himself, but lets the browser accept a cookie by default from each site.
Each cookie—so long as you don’t take action to remove one, as I did in my experiment—is returned to the server that left it on your browser. If you use a different browser, the server doesn’t know you’re the same person, and if a family member uses your browser to visit the same server, it doesn’t know you’re different people.
Because the browser returns the cookie only to servers from the same domain—say, yahoo.com—that sent the cookie, your identity is automatically segmented. Whatever yahoo.com knows about you, oreilly.com and google.com do not. Servers can also subdivide domains, so that mail.yahoo.com can use the cookie to keep track of your preferred mail settings while weather.yahoo.com serves meteorological information appropriate for your location.
This wall between cookies would seem to protect your browsing and purchasing habits from being dumped into a large vat and served up to advertisers. But for every technical measure protecting privacy, there is another technical trick that clever companies can use to breach privacy. In the case of cookies, the trick exploits the ability of a web to can display content from multiple domains simultaneously. Such flexibility in serving domains is normally used (aside from tweaks to improve performance) to embed images from one domain in a web page sent by another, and in particular to embed advertising images.
Now, if advertisers all contract with a single ad agency, such as DoubleClick (the biggest of the online ad companies), all the ads from different vendors are served under the doubleclick.com domain and can retrieve the same cookie. You don’t have to click on an ad for the cookie to be returned. Furthermore, each ad knows the page on which it was displayed.
Therefore, if you visit web pages about colic, skis, and Internet privacy at various times, and if DoubleClick shows an ad on each page, it can tell that the same person viewed those disparate topics and use that information to choose ads for future pages you visit. In the United States, unlike other countries, no laws prohibit DoubleClick from sharing that information with anyone it wants. Furthermore, each advertiser knows whether you click on their ad and what activity you carry on subsequently at their site, including any purchases you make and any personal information you fill out in a form.
Put it all together, and you are probably far from anonymous on the Internet. In addition, a more recent form of persistent data, controlled by the popular Flash environment through a technology called local shared objects, makes promiscuous sharing easy and removing the information much harder.
The purchase of DoubleClick in 2007 by Google, which already had more information on individuals than anybody else, spurred a great protest from the privacy community, and the FTC took a hard look before approving the merger. A similar controversy may surround Google’s recently announced purchase of AdMob, which provides a service similar to DoubleClick for advertisers on mobile phones.
So far I’ve just covered everyday corporate treatment of web browsing and e-commerce. The frontiers of data mining extend far into the rich veins of user content.
Deep packet inspection allows your Internet provider to snoop on your traffic. Normally, the ISP is supposed to look only at the IP address on each packet, but some ISPs check inside the packet’s content for various reasons that could redound to your benefit (if it squelches a computer virus) or detriment (if it truncates a file-sharing session). I haven’t heard of any ISPs using this kind of inspection for marketing, but many predictions have been aired that we’ll cross that frontier.
Governments have been snooping at the hubs that route Internet traffic for years. China simply blocks references to domains, IP addresses, or topics it finds dangerous, and monitors individuals for other suspected behavior. The Bush administration and American telephone companies got into hot water for collecting large gobs of traffic without a court order. But for years before that, the Echelon project was filtering all international traffic that entered or left the US and several of its allies.
One alternative to being tossed on the waves of marketing is to join the experiments in Vendor Relationship Management (VRM). Although not really implemented anywhere yet, this movement holds out the promise that we can put out bids for what we want and get back proposals for products and services. Maybe VRM will make us devote more conscious thinking to how we present ourselves online—and how many selves we want to present. These are the subjects of the next section.
Which is the natural man,
and which the spirit? who deciphers them?
What we’ve seen so far in this article would be enough to shake anyone’s sense of identity. We’ve found that the technology of the Internet itself fudges identity (but does not totally succeed in hiding it), that companies use fragmented and partial information to categorize you, and that your actual identity is perhaps less important to these companies than your role as snippet of a statistic within a larger group. This section of the article demands an even greater mental stretch: we have to face that what we say about ourselves is also distorted and inconclusive.
Sociological and psychologists tend to see our activities online as inherently artificial, referring to them as aspects of "the performative self." But the pundits haven’t succeeded in getting their point of view across to the wider public. For instance, the millions of people who view personal video weblogs, or vlogs, fervently believe—according to a recent First Monday article by Jean Christian—in the importance of authenticity in people’s video self-presentations. Viewers reject vlogs over such telltale signs as overediting or reading from scripts.
The touchstone for discussions of people’s appearances and what their appearances say about them is Erving Goffman’s classic Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The book suggested that we fashion our appearances not to hide our true selves, but to reveal them in a manner others find meaningful. Although we do prettify ourselves online, we can’t compartmentalize aspects of ourselves. In other words, whatever presentation we make in one context or forum is likely to leak out elsewhere.
The signals we give out and pick up instinctively about each other in real life have to be specified explicitly in online media (although graphics and video now bring back some instinctive reactions).
Goffman’s career ended before the Internet became a topic of sociological analysis, so at this point it’s appropriate to bring in the chief researcher in the area of identity and the Internet, psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle. She claims that we do maintain multiple online identities, and that this is no simple game but reflects a growing tendency for us to have multiple selves. The fragmentary and divided presentation of self online reflects the truth about ourselves, more than we usually acknowledge.
Turkle’s research, unfortunately, got channeled early in the Internet’s history into landscapes that don’t reflect its later use as a mass medium. She became fascinated, during the early years of popular computing and gaming in the 1980s, with the whims so many people indulged for portraying themselves as someone of a different age, gender, or profession, or just for hiding as much as they could in order to try out a different personality. This orientation colors both of her books on the subject, The Second Self (1984) and Life on the Screen (1995), and relegates her work to a study of psychological deviation.
Still, Turkle’s work can make us think about the vistas that the Internet opens up for the Self. Surveying the multiple identities we create online and the ways we represent or misrepresent ourselves, she finds that people don’t do this just for play or to maliciously deceive other people. Many do it to don identities that are hard to try on in real life.
A woman pretending to be a man might open up scenarios for practicing assertive behaviors that would produce a backlash if she rolled them out in real life. A shy person might learn, through an invented personality, how to flirt and even to practice mature love. Both of these forms of mimicry, which go back at least as far as Shakespeare’s As You Like It, have proven useful to many people online.
But beyond these simple sorts of play-acting (for which real life provides its settings: acting classes, long journeys, spiritual retreats, "What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas") we glimpse in online personas a contemporary view of the self that is multi-layered and multi-faceted—by no means integrated and consistent.
Turkle also explores the psychological impact of computer interfaces. In particular, programs that act like independent, autonomous decision-makers push us to rethink our own human identities.
In the 1960s, people would spend hours typing confessions into the psychologist persona presented by Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA program. Trying out ELIZA now, it’s hard to imagine anyone could be enticed into a serious conversation with it. But as we’ve grown more sophisticated, so have the deceits that programmers toss at us. Turkle reports an interaction with a robot at the MIT AI Lab that drew her in with a veracity that made her uncomfortable. "Despite myself and despite my continuing skepticism about this research project, I had behaved as though in the presence of another being."
Affective technologies have leapt even further ahead since 1995. Someday, robots for the disabled and elderly will try to reflect their feelings in order to provide care that goes beyond washing and feeding. Turkle draws on many strands of psychology, sociology, neurological science, and philosophy to show how our intellectual substrate has been prepared throughout the twentieth century for the challenges to Self that sophisticated computer programs present. Had the field of synthetic biology existed when Turkle wrote her books, it would have provided even more grist for her thesis.
This is one place where I part company with Turkle. I don’t believe we’re getting more and more confused about the dividing line between Computer Power and Human Reason (the title of a classic book by Weizenbaum, ELIZA’s creator). I have more faith in our discernment. Just as we can see through ELIZA nowadays, we’ll see through later deceptions as we become familiar with them. Simulated intelligences will not perennially pass the Turing test.
Turkle’s view of online behavior is more persuasive. I’m willing to grant that exploring identity on the Internet can help us develop neglected sides of our identity and integrate them into our real selves. She expects us to go even further—to develop these sides without integrating them. We can quite happily and (perhaps) healthily live multiple identities, facilitated by how we present ourselves online.
Let’s review the social setting in which Turkle inserts her arguments. Looking over the period during which the technologies and social phenomena Turkle researches have grown—the period from 1970 to the present, when MUDs and other online identity play developed—we see an astonishing expansion of possibilities for identity throughout real life. We have more choices than ever in career, geographic location, religious and spiritual practice, gender identification, and family status—let alone plastic surgery and drugs that alter our minds or muscles. People have reclaimed disappearing ethnic languages and turned vanishing crafts into viable careers. And people are experimenting with these things in countries characterized by repression as well as those considered more open.
Changes in speech and clothing allow us to try out different identities in different real-life settings with relative safety. We can sample a novel spiritual rite without relinquishing our traditional church. But of course, doing all these things online is even safer than doing them in physical settings.
Global information and movement lead to what sociologist Anthony Giddens, in his 1991 book Modernity and Self-Identity, calls reflexivity. I showed in the previous section how reflexivity works in the data collected by advertisers and corporate planners. Toward the cause of producing more of what we want and marketing it to us effectively, the corporations are constantly collecting information on us—purchases, web views and clicks, sentiment analysis—and feeding it back into activities that will, on the next phase, produce more such information. Reflexivity is a fundamental trait of modern institutions. But individuals, as Giddens points out, are also reflexive. We imitate what we see, online as well as offline. Online, it’s even easier to try something and learn from the results. Goth clothing and body piercings we pick up online are cheaper and easier to discard than real ones when we have to clean up our image.
However, we’re becoming more circumspect over the past few years as we realize that people will be able to tie our online forays back to us in the future; this may cause the lamentable end to experimentation with the Self.
Turkle refers to a story that was widely circulated and much discussed in an earlier decade, of a male psychiatrist who posed as a disabled but capable woman on CompuServe. He quickly entered supportive online relationships with a number of women. But as the relationships became too deep, he had to extricate himself from his virtual friends’ dependencies, leaving a good deal of anger and numerous sociological questions.
But the most interesting aspect of the story to me is that no one can verify it. It appears to be a conflation of various incidents involving different people. In a way, drawing any conclusions at all would be pointless, because we don’t know what emotions were involved and can’t investigate the participants’ positive and negative reactions. Thus does an influential and highly significant case study about Internet identity take on a murky identity of its own.
Today’s digital trails are more persistent than those ones that created the legend of the CompuServe psychiatrist. Anyone engaging with strangers today would probably carry on through social networks, blogs, or wikis that do a better job of preserving the trail of logins and postings.
Thus, I return to my assertion that identity is becoming more unified online, not more fragmented. We may not be exactly as we appear online, but for the purposes of public discourse, what we appear to be is adequate.
When college student Jennifer Ringley began her famous webcam of daily life in 1996, it was seen either as a bold experiment in conceptual art or a pathetic bid for attention. Soon, though, the inclusion of cheap cameras in cell phones fostered a youth culture that captured and distributed every trivial moment of their lives, a trend driven further by ease of using Twitter from a cell phone.
Handy access to networks by cameras and video devices made it inevitable that people would impulsively send sexually suggestive photos of themselves to people with whom they were having intimate relationships, or with whom they wanted such relationships. A rather unscientific survey by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that 20% of teenager send nude or semi-nude photos of themselves to other people. A less sensationalistic report from the Pew Research Center finds only 4%, but raises the mystique-shattering admonition that the trust shown by the senders of the photos is routinely violated by their recipients, either right away or later when the relationship is ruptured.
Addressing the safety issue in an earlier article, I suggest that "along the spectrum of risky behaviors young people engage in (eating disorders, piercings in dangerous locations, etc.) to deal with body image problems that are universal at that age, a nude photo isn’t so bad." But I would love to see a deeper psychological inquiry into why young (and not always young) people perform deal such blows to their own privacy. I think such counter-intuitive behavior embodies the very contradictions in image and reality that run through this series of articles.
Perhaps the eroticism of releasing intimate photos over the network reflects the core contradiction people sense in online identity. The nude photo is a unique token of one’s deepest identity, without actually being that identity. Like Rene Magritte’s famous pipe painting, the photo of you is not you. But by sending it to someone with whom you want a sexual relationship, you’re saying, "Hey bud, this could be me if you follow through in the flesh."
For a long time the Internet was praised as a place to shed the baggage of race and other defining traits ("nobody knows you’re a dog"). But as researchers such as Lisa Nakamura point out, postings that brim over with images and videos reintroduce race, gender, and other artifacts of daily life with a vengeance. And research by anthropologist danah michele boyd shows that people self-segregate in social forums, reinforcing rather than breaking down the social divisions that frustrate the prospects for mutual understanding among different races and groups.
One could throw in, as another consequence of the growth of identity, the oft-observed tendency to read only political articles that reinforce one’s existing views. Unlike other observers, who look back wistfully at an age where we all got our information from a few official media sources, I have applauded the proliferation of views, but agree that we need to find ways to encourage everyone to read the most cogent arguments of their opponents. Censorship—even self-censorship—does not contribute to identity formation in a healthy manner.
There’s also more than a hint of the trend toward asserting identity in the participatory culture chronicled and analyzed by Henry Jenkins: the fan fiction, the commentary sites for X Files and The Matrix, the games and consumer polls held by movie studios, and so forth. This participatory culture is mostly a community affair, which creates a group identity out of many unconnected individuals. But surely, creating an unauthorized sequel or re-interpreting a scene in a movie is also an act of personal expression. I would call it placing a stake in the cultural ground, except that the metaphor would be far too static for an ever-changing media stream. It would be more apt to call the personal contributions a way of inserting a marker with one’s identity into the ongoing reel of unfolding culture.
It’s a lot easier nowadays to be real when you’re on the Internet. But some people still, for many reasons, adopt forged identities or non-identities. We’ll explore that phenomenon next.
Haply you shall not see me more; or if, a mangled shadow.
One reason Sherry Turkle saw the Internet through the prism of invented identity—or, perhaps, found the aspects of Internet life that corroborated her own interests as a psychologist with a fondness for postmodernism—was her choice to seek out initial contacts from serious players of 1970s multi-user dungeons. These environments were fantasy lands, entirely concerned with forged identities; indeed, it would be well-nigh impossible to create an identity in those environments that was the least bit realistic.
All the old MUDs survive, and have been joined by even more popular ones such as World of Warcraft, along with more general fantasy environments such as Second Life and IMVU. But they no longer set the tone for Internet participation. The momentum has gone to social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, and Orkut, where people are asked to bring their external life online in as genuine a fashion as possible. Disclosure rather than concealment is widely recognized now as the trend, such as heard in the conversations of leading Internet watchers at the 2008 Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology.
One can see why modern commerce would prefer social networking to MUDs, because people discussing music, clothes, movies, and sports are much easier to sell things to than orcs and medieval monks. Current social network sites depend on their funding—if they have weaned themselves to any degree from venture capital—through advertising. Ironically, though, they create the kinds of empowered, self-organized communities that can find and disseminate product information on their own and therefore render advertising increasingly redundant.
MySpace has taken advertising to the next stage and become a platform whose members are the ads. Pop musicians don’t need billboards and radio spots any more; MySpace is their promotion.
But a few social network visitors still find fantasy more rewarding than the presentation of their real selves. Obvious examples include people who create dummy accounts so as to laud their own organizations or writings and rate them up.
Unlike World of Warcraft players, these forged identities move through a landscape of overwhelmingly real denizens who assume that the forged identities are real. The result can unfortunately be deadlier than the most aggressive World of Warcraft encounter.
Middle-aged men posing as teenagers to snare girls are one real danger. The opportunity to post anonymously or pseudonymously accounts facilitates cyberbullying and threats, while terrorists are reported to do their recruiting on social networks as well. But perhaps the saddest story of forgery is the suicide of Megan Meier.
Meier was a 13-year-old girl with a history of depression—in fact, she had made suicide attempts before—and apparent difficulties fitting in at school. One of her female peers, along with two older female confederates—one of them being her 49-year-old mother, who one would have expected to have more sense—created a MySpace account purporting to be a boy named Josh. This forged Josh befriended Meier in 2006, drew close to her in a relationship that could serve in many online communities as a romantic encounter, then abruptly terminated contact—with nasty language eerily echoing the taunts Meier had repeatedly experienced from schoolmates.
Megan Meier, like a modern Ophelia, took the rejection to heart and killed herself. The plot was uncovered and the mother arrested. But now an odd legal twist intervened: no law could be found to apply. Before her case was dismissed on appeal, she was handed a misdemeanor conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The prosecution hung from a thread, however, because the district attorney was reduced to arguing that her "fraud" consisted of violating a routinely ignored clause in the MySpace terms of service that prohibited misrepresenting oneself. (At the time this article is written, their terms of service require that "all registration information you submit is truthful and accurate.")
Had the original ruling been upheld, it would have instantly criminalized thousands of people, including my adult daughter, who created a Facebook account for the stuffed animal she has held on to since childhood. (Like many other people, she defies the research of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who called the child’s stuffed animal a "transitional object.")
So it is still legal to masquerade online. But while plenty of people stretch the truth, few go so far as to create an entire persona from whole cloth. Turkle points out that the strain of keeping up appearances is too great. I have reflected the difficulty of lying online by using the term "forged" for such identities—forged not just in the sense that they’re fake, but in the sense that creating one recalls the intense exertion of beating a metal artifact out on the anvil.
One person who found the effort worthwhile was amateur economist Park Dae-Sung of South Korea. Park frequented popular web forums for financial discussions and tossed his opinions into the stew with hundreds of other casual posters. There is nothing unusual about this (my own brother likes to go on such forums), but Park distinguished himself in two ways: he predicted some of the global financial disasters that hit in late 2008, and he was so authoritative that he gave the impression he was some macher high up in government or finance.
The South Korean government was embarrassed by his accurate criticisms of the finance industry’s greed and of the government’s own policies. Apparently, however, some of his postings were also incorrect. Once they uncovered his identity, the police found an excuse to arrest him "on charges of spreading false data in public with a harmful intent." He was acquitted, but South Korea still appears to be a place where it’s dangerous to be anonymous.
I pointed out in an earlier section of this article that logging in to a coffee shop network effectively renders one anonymous, and that some countries prohibit such logins in an anti-crime posture. Most of what the governments are fighting is the unauthorized exchange of copyrighted music and movies, although they like to claim that they’re also trying to prevent violent criminals and terrorists from hiding their tracks.
One would expect restrictions on anonymity in countries that have a history of suppressing free speech or political activity. But one of the strongest controls on identity was set recently by France in a law that combats illegal file-sharing by actually forcing repeat offenders offline. The British government has recently proposed a similar bill. Clearly, to enforce a ban on Internet use, France and Britain must also prevent anonymous logins.
Once you’re online, you can hide your activities with a degree of effort. In a country that monitors its residents’ visits to web sites, you can run software that connects you him to another computer—probably located in a more tolerant country—to request a web page and have it tunneled back through the proxy computer.
In the 1990s, a very popular anonymous remailer was run out of Finland under the name anon.penet.fi. Anyone could send email through it; the server would assign a random email address and send it on to the requested destination. Return email would be matched up with the real email address of the original sender and delivered in the other direction.
anon.penet.fi was heavily used by critics of the Church of Scientology to post secret church documents to public news groups. The church finally resorted to Finnish law to force the server’s administrator to reveal the email address of one of these posters, and the administrator decided to shut down the server because he could no longer guarantee the anonymity it promised. In a significant historical premonition, the pretext used by the church to squelch the exchange of information was copyright infringement, the same claim that drives most of the current laws and court cases forcing ISPs to reveal their users’ identities.
A more formal and sophisticated version of this proxying is provided by onion networks, which route traffic from one randomly chosen computer to another in a series, and send the replies back through the same path. To establish that the two endpoints actually exchanged traffic would be impossible later, unless an investigator could trace every link between every pair of neighbors. (There are also forms of snooping based on timing the traffic leaving and arriving at different systems, so some onion networks go so far as to insert random delays to make these attacks harder.)
The use of a proxy exposes that proxy to prosecution instead of the person it is protecting, but some proxies operate out of jurisdictions where they can advertise their services without fear, and onion networks tend to be tolerated because even law enforcement and military organizations find them useful for their own purposes. The US Navy, for instance, actively supports the development of onion networks.
As people ask for help online, and respond to that help, as with InnoCentive and Amazon Mechanical Turk, actors with possibly objectionable motives can outsource work without revealing their identities and goals. Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, in a video lecture, listed both actual and potential abuses of crowdsourcers’ good will.
The principle behind this form of identity hiding is that many crowdsourcing sites are proxies, and therefore play the the role of proxies in masking the identities of those who post tasks to perform. The Internet has often been hailed as a disintermediator—allowing vendors and buyers to communicate directly, for instance—but as sites aggregate tasks, the Internet can also re-intermediate the clients who offer tasks, and hide their identities along the way.
In short, the Internet is not yet MySpace. With some exceptions, you can strut out onto the Internet as anyone you want to be, and duck under the radar of those who want to delve into your real identity.
So may a thousand actions, once afoot,/End in one purpose, and be all well borne/Without defeat."
Despite all the variations played on the theme of personal identities in the previous sections, remember that identity is a group construct, not an individual one. If we never took part in groups, our personal identities would scarcely matter.
We’re all members of certain groups without our choice: the particular race, social class, or gender that other people assign us to. When a woman posts a seductive picture online, she is helping to shape the way men and other women view womanhood in general. The same goes when she posts a demonstration of herself expertly fixing a computer or operating a super-collider. And the image every member of a racial minority puts up of himself or his cohorts, like it or not, determines the way all members of that race are judged.
It seems an invariant of human culture to exploit the image of an individual in order to leave an impression about the entire group to which he or she belongs. It has been done by the arts and mass media ever since they were invented, but the Internet gives millions of ordinary people the chance to inflect the process.
Going by Goffman’s extremely broad definition of "framing"—any assumption or shared knowledge that lies behind a visible act is part of the frame—identity might be the most important frame of all, and the locus around which other frames revolve. Thus, my identity as an English-speaker and US native frames the starting point of this article from the perspective of a world technological and cultural center.
Others, though, may come to the Internet with an identity impaired by its very use. For instance, they may have to sacrifice their languages, or at least the character sets they traditionally use, in order to communicate online in a cost-effective way.
As Lisa Nakamura points out in her book Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), individuals can expand or criticize conventional images of women, Asians, Muslims, and others by reusing images and mashing them up in challenging ways. Nakamura even suggests that the typical slicing and recombination of digital images reflects the way people create their identities from fragments of older traditions, which in turn have been shattered by the economics and culture of modern global change.
Technology also groups us. Are we the first to jump on a new medium such as Voice over IP or Google Wave? Just as—to cite Giddens—we express identity through lifestyle choices such as vegetarianism or living in a downtown apartment instead of a house in the suburbs, we express identity through the devices we buy and the Internet services we use. And other people make assumptions about our identity based on these things.
Let’s turn now to groups at a more intimate level. Every online forum has the potential to be a small community—and even a small government, with rules backed up by unique punishments—where people train each other to carry out their identities in various ways.
Groups must be explicit and conscious of group identity. Online media rarely provide chances for the equivalent of sitting at a bar with grizzled veterans and hearing their stories. That is why groups often post rules (check out Wikipedia’s, which are complicated enough to call for an entire wiki of their own) to deal with churn and the lack of opportunities to pass on norms informally.
This article began with the hope of understanding the current state of the art in online group formation: social networking. The reason social networking sites hold promise is that they augment the individual, an echo of Douglas Engelbart’s goal to augment personal achievement through the invention of the mouse and multimedia networking in the 1960s. In a 2004 article (PDF), anthropologist danah michele boyd made the observation—or perhaps just reported a subject’s observation—that these networks try to represent each person’s identity as the set of connections he or she has. At Friendster, at least (where people look up each others’ friends for potential dates), the networks of friends become the main show. The same criticism could be made of LinkedIn, where the chief goal is career-building rather than dating.
Perhaps adding relationships to our definition of identity can humanize the concept, as suggested by Cynthia Kurtz. I explained the importance of sharing information with "friends of friends" in a comment added to an earlier section of this article. But when viewed in the worst light, Friendster and LinkedIn cheapen your identity to the connections you can offer other people.
Just as rudimentary digital cameras—especially when embedded in mobile devices—have confirmed the old notion that a picture is worth a thousand words, the connecting power of social networks will be multiplied a thousandfold if facial recognition improves to the point where it can automatically disseminate information about where we were and whom we met. If automated crawling tools could identify faces in millions of photos taken at parties, conferences, banquets, and even public places, and then combine the information to determine who knows whom, the amount of information that would become publicly available about our habits and associations would be staggering.
For instance, imagine if the recently announced service for photo recognition, Google Goggles, evolves to the point where it can match faces against faces in other photos. And then imagine that Google provides Goggles as an API for use with social networks where people tag photos with names. A single tag by a cousin on your photo at a party could lead to your being associated with everybody else in all other photos of you posted online. These developments, while not imminent, are plausible in the light of past advances in the technologies.
Social networks create a new personal information economy. We already have such an economy in real-life’s customer reward cards: we give up valuable information about our long-term purchasing habits in exchange for discounts. Some business experts suggest a similar explicit arrangement for the Internet. Regulations would prohibit the retention of information unrelated to a sale, but allow retailers to offer discounts in exchange for the right to retain certain types of information. This would make privacy a class issue, because the affluent would be most likely to forgo the bribe and withhold their information. And because the affluent are the biggest spenders, businesses are unlikely to find it worth their while to support this compromise.
Everyone on social networks is engaging in the new personal information economy. We choose to post our favorite movies in order to meet fans and learn about new movies we’d like. And we reveal the colleges we attended so we can meet potential business partners from those institutions. We even post jokes and casual observations to earn people’s admiration. While we’re all having fun, every nugget we release is subjected first, consciously or unconsciously, to a key question: will we get some benefit from the social network commensurate with the value of the information we are about to give our contacts?
This view of social network as economy provides a partial answer to the questions posed at the very start of this article:
Should we post our age and marital status? Should we make our profile private or public? Should we reveal that we’re gay?…
The answer is that each of us is responsible for assessing the value of posting at every moment, taking into consideration the tone of the network, how many people are watching our postings, what they can offer us, and more.
The economy extends to sending nude photographs of yourself to current or would-be lovers. The recent report from the Pew Research Center says no less: "Sexually suggestive images sent to the privacy of the phone have become a form of relationship currency." Exhibitionists don’t seem to realize that their photos are likely to travel far beyond the person to whom they’re entrusted—a bitter truth that, once admitted, would certainly alter the senders’ economic calculations.
While filtering our contributions to the network, we also filter those who are entitled to receive them—and here the economy is out of balance. Rampant are the complaints about receiving connection requests you don’t want from old boyfriends or the guys who smoked dope with you in high school. Social networking urgently needs to establish a culture in which it’s OK to say that you’re filtering your connections. (A couple years ago I rejected a connection and got a death threat in return. Looking at the person’s profile, I determined that it was a joke—but I still think twice about visiting the city where he lives.)
Although connections on social networks are definitive, no one asks about the identity of the social network itself (except shareholders hoping to increase its popularity and critics trying to change its policies). But some online communities head in a very different direction. Law professor Beth Simone Noveck, in an essay titled "A democracy of groups," points out that self-organized groups can mold their own unique identities in order to effect collective action.
Noveck’s optimism regarding self-organizing groups led to the current experiments with online democracy pursued by the Obama administration, where Noveck was appointed to both the transitional team and a Deputy CTO position to start implementation of the Open Government initiative that Obama released on his first day in office.
In Noveck’s theory, a group’s effectiveness depends on each member’s success is gelling his or her individual identity. "Through visual and graphical representation, this new technology enables people to see themselves and others and to perceive the role they have assumed. Appearing as a defined person—whether by name or in an embodied avatar—makes it easier to sense oneself as part of a group and, arguably, will facilitate the inculcation of the social norms at the heart of a group’s culture."
These are intriguing claims, but it’s odd that Noveck does not consider the ability to import external markers of identity into the group space, or to check members’ assertions of identity against these external markers. For instance, what if visitors to Second Life could receive a token from her law school (through the OAuth protocol, say) that validates her as a professor?
One way to tie individuals more tightly together in online groups, as explained in her article, is to make online forums feel more like real-world places so that people can develop "forms of attachment" to the forums in ways that they feel emotionally attached to their town square, college, or other local "great good place" (to borrow the name of a popular book by Ray Oldenburg). As Noveck writes, "The new generation of technology is reintroducing the concept of space and place online." As an example she cites Second Life, which was growing rapidly in popularity at the time. Effectively, she is granting groups identities, just like individuals, and recommending that a group foment stronger ties among its members by creating a stronger group identity.
No one in the Obama administration has picked up the most aggressive suggestion in A democracy of groups, that the law recognize groups as entities—"new forms of collective legal personhood"—in a similar manner to how it now recognizes corporations. But Vermont has taken a step in that direction by changing its laws to allow virtual corporations, and ultimately we may be dealing with group identity online as much as with individual identity.
An honest tale speeds best being plainly told.
After viewing in rotation the various facets of that gem that we call identity , it is time for us to polish and view them in one piece. This series has explored what identity means in an online medium, the most salient aspect of which is the digitization of information. Consider what the word digitization denotes: the fragmentation of a whole into infinitesimal, fungible, individually uncommunicative pieces. The computer digitizes everything we post about ourselves not only literally (by storing information in computer-readable formats) but metaphorically, as the computer scatters our information into a meaningless diaspora of data fields, status updates, snapshots, and moments caught on camera or in audio—as Shakespeare might say, signifying nothing.
No computer—only a person—can reassemble and breath life into these dry bones, creating from them a narrative.
Anthony Giddens, whom I quoted earlier in the section on selves, says that constructing a narrative for oneself is an obligatory part of feeling one has an identity. Giddens does not seem to take the Internet on in his writings. But it’s a reasonable stretch to say that we build up narratives online, and others do so for us, through the digitized, disembodied (or to use Giddens’s term, disembedded) bits of information posted over time.
In place of the term narrative, some psychologists, who would probably love to do an intake interview on Hamlet, refer to the self as being established through a soliloquy. However you look at identity formation, taking it online extends its reach tremendously. The soliloquies we engage in, and the narratives we create for ourselves, reshape our memories and determine our futures. But these self-interrogations that used to take place in our craniums while we lay in bed at night now happen in full view of the world.
College development staff and others who search for information on us are building up narratives haphazardly based on available data. On blogs and social networks, however, we quite literally provide them with the narrative. Perhaps that’s why those media became popular so quickly, and why so many people urge their friends to follow them: social media take some of the anarchy out of our presentation of self.
The next step to gain more control over searches about yourself or your business may be emotionally formidable as well as time-consuming: when someone comments about you on any searchable forum, answer him. The answer can be on the same forum as the original comment or on some site more under your control, such as your blog—use whatever setting is appropriate for what you have to say. You can then only hope that your reply is picked up and treated as important by the search engines.
One indication of Shakespeare’s genius was the parallel, distinct narratives he managed to create in Hamlet—or as Goffman might put it, his ability to develop two sophisticated frames that are totally at odds throughout the play. Similar stylistic devices have been worked into thriller moves, spy novels, and thousands of other settings since then.
Everyone except Hamlet himself (and a few sympathetic colleagues) created a narrative as uncompromising as it was terrifying. Hamlet was seen as irrational, brooding, provocative, ungrateful, impulsively amoral, cruel, dangerously violent, and totally out of control.
Only we, the audience, see Hamlet the way he saw himself: brilliant, sensitive, almost telepathically alert, courageous, unambiguously righteous, gifted with a hidden power, blessed by a divine mission—in short, a hero.
Upon all my readers I wish narratives unlike Hamlet’s. I hope you never feel the need to construct for yourself a narrative, online or offline, as desperate as the ones he constructed. At the same time, I hope that other people de-digitizing a narrative from your online signals do not see you as Polonius or Laertes saw Hamlet.
But we have to accept that we are constrained in life by how others see us, that many will formulate opinions from the digital trail we are all building just by living in the modern world, and that we can’t control how others see this trail. There are just a few things we can do to improve our prospects for surviving and thriving online.
We can assess the economic value of what we reveal: what we are allowing others to do by revealing something, and what we may get back of value. And like economists, we have to think long-term as well as short-term, because the data we reveal is up there forever.
We can also develop tolerance for others, learning not to judge them because we don’t know the back story to what we see online, as I have recommended in an earlier article.
Finally, we should accept that we can’t bring other people’s image of us into conformity with what we feel is our true identity. But at least we can resist bringing our identity into conformity with their image.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.