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.
