Not too long ago, online community meant one place — you’d go to a BBS (remember The WELL?) or your favorite MUD or Usenet if you were fancy. Back then, it seemed like you left one place for another when when you wanted to leave that identity behind: the straight-laced professor playing whip-wielding dominatrix by night and all that kind of thing. It took work, but it was hip to have secret screen names. It was hip to fracture your identity.
And it still is. What’s different now is that our identities get fractured even when we don’t want them to. With the daily arrival of new web 2.0 gadgets, we’ve got pieces of our identity everywhere — photos, blog entries, bookmarks, music, comments, calendar events, movie reviews, each on a different service or three, each with its own community. Online community has gone mainstream but, with your artifacts spread across a myriad different services, online identity seems to have done just the opposite. That’s fine if you want to maintain multiple identities, but what if you want to bring all those pieces of yourself back together again?
Where we once worked so hard to maintain multiple identities, now pieces of ourselves are so far flung that we have to work equally hard to compose just one. Online identity has been inverted. Once whole, we wanted to be fractured. Now fractured, we want to be whole.
And boy do we want to be whole. Take blogs, where folks have cobbled together their far-flung online artifacts in sidebars for some time. And Gravatars let us maintain one identity from blog to forum to chat. More recently, Jeremy Keith’s Lifestream initiative has managed to pull all your bits into a single textual stream. What’s next?
It’s early days, but this has the potential to lead someplace very interesting. Imagine being able to present your recent pictures alongside your discussion posts alongside music you listened to alongside news stories you dugg, each collected from a different service. Then, imagine allowing visitors to dive into that history, seeing all facets of your identity as one coherent whole. There’s a richness here that the right glue could really bring out.
But the higher level point is that online identity isn’t just a profile on myspace or a catalog of photos on flickr or a blog on typepad. Online identity is all these things. And giving people control over the artifacts of their experience is as important as the experience itself. It’s the history of you. Grab hold of it.
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A secret Identity on line ? A phantasy person ? Between the lines however we always reveal our true personality just as we do to others off line
Joanna
Not that I’m not excited about the turn identity-aggregation is taking, but I’m hoping the same can be done for authored content and shared experiences - to help set context without the overhead of having to find everything manually. I’m thinking specifically of the collaboration or meeting experience. During a meeting, content is shared… maybe even authored. The content has a life outside of that meeting experience and needs to find it’s way (with other content) to other meetings. But it’s hard to manage that. I think social software may pave the way for automatically managing artifacts that are tied to particular people and particular experiences.
Hey, Tracee. Thanks for the thoughts!
It does seem like social software can help intersect artifacts and experience in new and interesting ways. What I’m talking about is helping people collect their artifacts from all over and use them to present their identity more coherently and richly. But it certainly does seem like the next logical step could be to let them leverage these collected artifacts collaboratively.
This reminds me of the Milestones in Time project, which aimed to show one person’s documents on the local computer in the context of events that happened in their life and the world. I imagine an interesting follow-on project might be to take a similar approach to groups of people working together (and generating artifacts together) over time.
I/we/they/you agree. I’d like to control my identity, but I’m not sure which I would be in control if I did. So I let others reflect back who I am, and reflect back why they are to me. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an I. Then it’s an I for an I, and after a while, we all get sick and tired of I-dolatry.
Michael
haha. Nice one, Michael. I’ve been thinking about this more lately in the context of life history — how much work my parents have had to do in order to collect and preserve the life stories of their parents and grandparents. Will our children have it easier because of all our online identity caching? The gut reaction is probably yes but as dotcoms fold and information gets spread all over, I wonder if their process of pulling it all together will actually turn out to be all that different.