With an explosion of social software services springing up all around us, it seems inevitable that web-developers start thinking portal as they did in the late 1990s. Those early portals became all-services-in-one monoliths, with Yahoo as the prototype. Today, the model lives on in the form of “typo” domain squatters.
While the portal may have made sense for web services based on information consumption because it centralized otherwise disparate sites into one, I would argue that it is a problematic model for social software. Here I’m defining social software as any online system that makes identity publicly accessible. Public online identities are constructed wherever content is user-generated, anywhere from a comment on someone’s blog to a slideshow of vacation photos. In the social software sphere, it’s become commonplace to attach public “profile” pages, of one form or another, to every personal account.
Then along come services like SuprGlu and the envisioned GoingOn Network, nifty and convenient tools for tying your many dispersed identies all together in a neat package. However, there are emergent sociological dangers that lurk beneath this tidy surface.
Like identity in the material world, identity in online communities is created in social contexts. The embodied world conveniently keeps our many identities distinct because they are tied to different physical places: the office vs. the bar vs. the S & M club. In the collapsed geography of cyberspace, every room is adjacent to every other, and the walls are thin.
While I may lead a less divided life than some, I’m still a little nervous at the prospect of mixing personal and professional identities freely and haphazardly. With digitally-mediated social interactions leaving traces in persistent and searchable databases, and with community contributions tied to public profiles, the neat partitions of identity are eroding. My del.icio.us links are open for anyone in the world to see, as are my flickr photos. We’re waking up to the face that we are many people in one body…people sometimes better left separate. Call me self-conscious, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea of potential employers browsing my vacation photos or taking notes on the political leanings of my Facebook friends.
Case in point
Jennifer hates her chemistry teacher, and now the whole world knows it, possibly her teacher too. The problem is even more severe for active adults with complex, compartmental lives. While it may not seem so bad now, eventually Jennifer is going to grow up and try to get a job; meanwhile the Wayback Machine has been diligently archiving her entire adolescence for her future employers, college admissions committees, boyfriends and landlords to see and pass judgment on.
I see this coming down to a redefinition of public and private in the digital world. This is a new kind of shared space, where the digital analogue of casual conversation between friends becomes world-wide-readable (e.g. Myspace). “Public” should mean something different for an anarchist message board thread than for a blog posting. One is cloistered communication between members of a small, tight-knit community. The other is global self-publication to a world audience. Yet both are about equally findable in a Google Age. You and I, Jennifer and the anarchists — we’re all facing the aggregation of a potentially limitless number of disparate identities into one, very public identity.
Long story short: please don’t build this. 1) It’s ugly and complicated. 2) It breaks identity boundaries (friends and colleagues). 3) It freely mixes public and private.
Instead, make something that puts me in control of my many selves, including who has access to what information. This is the mission of Identity Commons, though it remains to be seen if it’s workable.
How does the sharing of what you explicitly mark as public possibly paint the wrong picture of you? One thing is for certain: if it does, it’s your fault, because you have complete control over what you make public.
While it is true that your “digital self” (i.e., the collection of all the stuff you generate) can and often does reveal multiple “facets” of your interests and perhaps personality, the bottom line is that all such interpretation results from others viewing the stuff you’ve CHOSEN to share. Yes, my del.icio.us bookmarks might reveal more than one interest, but at my own discretion.
If you’re already blogging, sharing bookmarks, and sharing photos, I don’t see how having one place to share them “mixes public and private.”
Admittedly, my view seems clear to me, and so I may be biased. I’m also behind Peoplefeeds (www.peoplefeeds.com) so I appologize if I’m acting convinced. I believe that there is a purpose for associating content you generate with yourself, and at least the bigger idea behind Peoplefeeds is proving it.
I have somewhat entangled two critiques in this post: a criticism of a particular kind of software and a cautionary tale that the whole internet is an aggregator of public identities due to information persistence and searchability. An online community space may be designed to feel like an insulated room filled with like-minded people…but there is no ceiling — and the whole world is listening in.
randomly came across your blog… some good stuff here. at goingon, we had several discussions on the issue of allowing multiple identities, but held it off since it creates a messy world and is a feature that only serves a very small portion of the online world. we also wanted to avoid having potential stalker issues with people hiding behind various identities
to deal with some of the issues you mentioned here, we are focusing on access controls based on degrees and context of your relationships.
Access control based on the context of a relationship seems potentially like a good solution. I wonder how many you’d need to fully solve the problem. Professional and Personal are probably the first useful symmetry break. Flickr has a Friends and Family distinction for photo access control.
There is an intriguing literature in the social and developmental psychology field around what is “the self”. Is it a single integrative mind or multiple selves? Irving Goffman even argues as a sociologist that we are all and only ‘masks’ - that there is no self. In the research area of computer-mediated communications (JCMC and Information and Society), there are many writers postulating that cyberspace enables identity play so that people can try out other genders, ages, even other species to see how they are responded to so as to figure out who they would like to be. Stanford psychologist Hazel Markus calls this “possible selves”. These are big and interesting issues and online worlds and relationships become a new medium for, if you will, ‘authoring the self’.
>Irving Goffman even argues as a sociologist that we are all and only ‘masks’ - that there is no self.
I’ve heard this many times in my cultural anthropology classes before - they call this “performance theory,” “performativity,” or “performance studies.” Seems like there’s no real categorization of this sociological lense yet, and probably because it’s far too broad. I’ve heard the term used in constructions of syntax ( J.L. Austin), all the way to constructions of gender and self (see Judith Butler). Key to Butler and her colleague’s theories is that we perform differently, and usually unconsciously so, for each unique situation we find ourselves in. That is to say, we have a mask for every occasion, whether we like it or not.
The internet has been extremely liberating for those wishing to wear certain masks: the gay man in rural Montana may not have the physical social space to be “himself”, but on the internet he can find other like-minded men without fear. The dark side to this is that the pedophile can easily don deceptive masks, too.
If we’re nothing more than a collection of masks, what is the “self”? Are we ever in a mask-less state that reveals the true self? If one has a huge variance in masks worn, does this mean he has a less-defined, more scattered inner self?
I can’t help but feel like a discrete entity, an individual. But maybe there is no “me”. If the only way “me” is constructed is through interactions with others and my environment, the lines distinguishing the individual from the collective seem to blur considerably.
It is the intention or directed attention of the individual that is the precise mirror of ones life energy. What an onlooker can see of you and what you know to be true of yourself, are two distinct things. Unless you lose your shit and go insane.