Value and identity

I increasingly feel that understanding value is key to understanding identity. Value is a concept that faces into our psychological and economic worlds. We value things and people emotionally; but things and people can also be of value to us in a concrete, material sense. And in "identifying" something or someone, are we not effectively assigning a complex set of values to them, whereby, for example, {entity type = human}, {eye colour = green} {relationship status with me = colleague} {name = Andrew}? Moreover, this kind of variable/value pairing is something that every geek understands—suggesting the possibility of a seamless extension of the values in our head to those in our computers if we could only understand how the heck our brain, and beyond it our consciousness, ticks.

My brilliant friend and white paper ("Towards the Identity Society"—pdf) co-author John Madelin talks about a three-dimensional business context of value, risk and convenience for information transactions; recasting this concept purely in terms of value, we might understand the dimensions of John's model as positive value potential ("value"), negative value potential ("risk") and the friction involved in realising the positive or negative potential value. An example: I buy a coffee grinder on eBay. The positive potential value for me is making a good-value purchase; the negative potential value (risk) is that I will be ripped off; the friction (convenience level) is how easy or hard my computer's software, eBay's web service, my bank and the seller make the whole process for me. And, of course, I value convenience highly.

Zoom out a little and look at the blue-green jewel of our planet from space. Value that? And the little creatures scuttling around on it? Thought so.

Value. It's a valuable concept.