Identity Society launch event in the BT Tower

Identity Society is delighted to announce an Open Space event (aka "unconference") on February 19th in the revolving restaurant space on the 34th floor of the BT tower in central London. The tower's curious history as an Official Secret is detailed here. Our panoramic views (one shown below) will surely inspire us to think big about our objectives. Identity Society is still just a twinkle in our eye—this event is an amazing opportunity for you to contribute to its meme pool at inception.

But what is the Identity Society actually about?

Our integrated experience of our own and others' identity helps us make sense of our life: each person's unique, individual experience is threaded though their interactions with friends, family, businesses, government, doctors, the legal system and information of all kinds. At the same time, as individuals, we are very skilled at selectively disclosing and concealing aspects of our identity according to context and need.

So, given our consumate individual skills with identity, why is our society so often so poor at mediating the flow of identity information for helpful outcomes? Why can't we make key medical information readily available to doctors in an emergency without compromising our privacy at other times? Or enjoy a personalised shopping experience that is joined up across retailers? Or have our government vouch for our identity without allowing them to track our every action? What is the psychological impact of revealing or concealing our identity in various situations? And at root, what does identity mean anyhow?

These are just a few of the questions that Identity Society might address. But the Open Space event is an opportunity for us to work out what the best questions really are, and to begin to devise an effective strategy to answer them. Some of the best and the brightest in the UK and US identity scene are already signed up to attend—we hope to see you there too!

Click here to register!

image courtesy of James Scridland

Sxipper, your faithful identity hound

I just signed up for Sxipper, a great little service for Firefox that takes the hassle out of website logins and forms by storing information about your various personas (work, personal, private etc.) for you.

The service is beautifully designed and highly useable—it reminds me of CoComment (for blog comment tracking) in the way it meshes with my existing browser workflows. The semantic training process, where you can teach Sxipper to fill in forms correctly, is deftly handled also. Finally, as an OpenID provider, Sxipper is well placed to help users tap into the nascent OpenID ecosystem.

Well done, Dick—I know you have worked long and hard to get to this point!

Identification, interest and distance

Chris Anderson writes on his blog that "our interest in a subject is in inverse proportion to its distance (geographic, emotional or otherwise) from us".

I think Chris's observation tacitly encapsulates the deeper meaning of a key aspect of identity, namely "identification": the more interested you are in a subject, the closer you feel to it, and therefore the more you "identify" with it.

Writing into the void

A delicious anecdote of unintended signifiers from Bruno Giussani:

Laurent Wolf is a culture critic with the Swiss daily Le Temps. He is a subtle observer of culture and society, but no one is infallible. In his first column of the year, published Tuesday, Laurent told this story (my simplified summary; the longer French version is here, for subscribers only):

I received last Summer from a publisher a review copy of a small book called "Everybody should write", authored by Georges Picard. The cover was sober, the publisher serious. But when I started reading it, I discovered that it was blank. I mean: all pages were white. Not a word, not a trace of ink. I started imagining: maybe, like Wittgenstein suggesting that what can't be said shouldn't be said, the publisher is telling me that what can't be written shouldn't be written. Or maybe he is astutely offering white pages for everybody to write on, inviting the "readers" to become "writers" - as the title suggests. Marveling at this wisdom, I wrote three months ago a short commendatory piece telling my readers about this laconic literary work - and pointing out the whiteness of the pages.

Except that a few days later, browsing a bookstore's aisles, I discovered that the copies of Picard's book on sale there were actually full of words, and that my copy was just the result of an industrial mistake. I started expecting an amused note from the author, or from the publisher, or some reader's letter highlighting my journalistic shallowness.

But nothing came. Not a complaint, not a word. Nobody had noticed.

Beautiful!

The ad generator

For a few minutes of culturally-significant amusemnent, check out the ad generator:

The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly. By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

The ad generator was created by Alexis Lloyd as a component of an MFA thesis project in the Design and Technology department at Parsons The New School for Design.

For me, the most fun part of this is trying to guess the Flickr tags that have allowed the matching of phrase to image—sometimes far from obvious!

[via TechCrunch]

Misspent taxes

Surprise, surprise, the UK online tax self assessment site has fallen over on the Sunday ten days before the deadline. Must have been hard to predict all that traffic. Nice to know how well my taxes are being spent on government IT projects. Bah!

UPDATE: I got it working in Firefox—either it was that, or they propped their servers back up! I must admit that the form itself is rather well implemented. Ahem. And my tax was a bit less than I feared. ; )

Devices, technological and rhetorical

Nick Carr plays to the gallery on his familiar pro-elitism theme with regard to "Steve's devices":

...

Jobs, in fact, couldn't possibly be more out of touch with today's Web 2.0 ethos, which is all about grand platforms, open systems, egalitarianism, and user-generated content. Like the iPod, the iPhone is a little fortress ruled over by King Steve. It's as self-contained as a hammer. It's a happening staged for an elite of one. The rest of us are free to gain admission by purchasing a ticket for $500, but we're required to remain in our seats at all times while the show is in progress. User-generated content? Hah! You can't even change the damn battery. In Jobs's world, users are users, creators are creators, and never the twain shall meet.

Which is, of course, why the iPhone, like the iPod, is such an exquisite device. Steve Jobs is not interested in amateur productions.

Nick is conveniently overlooking the inclusion of a fully-featured web browser (Safari) in the iPhone, which will furnish users with a very big gap indeed in the Garden wall. All the same, you can't help but relish his punchy and rhetorical word-smithery.

5 things you (probably) didn't know about me

Andres tagged me. So now I must tell you all five little-known things about me:

1. I lived with my mother and sister in a hippy commune for six months when I was seven. None of the kids went to school; we just ran wild and did occasional projects with the adults' help, doing stuff like building go-karts or (once) making a "magazine" with a journalist who was passing through.
2. The name "Razzell" is at least as English as it is French: my social demographer father and his brother have traced it back hundreds of years.
3. I sat many 10-day, silent, Vipassana meditation retreats in my twenties. Time does weird things when you don't talk or do anything much for that long. A minute can seem like an hour, then a whole day like a minute when you look back.
4. I won a prize in an international English-Japanese translation competition a few years back, and considered a career in translation.
5. I teach piano to celebrities' and public figures' children. Pupils have included the kids of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sir Tim Bell (head of Lowe Bell PR firm) and the Mascolo Family (Toni and Guy, TiGi Hair etc.).

Well, there you go!

WikiLeaks

Here comes WikiLeaks, one more nail in the coffin of information concealment:

WikiLeaks is developing an uncensorable version of WikiPedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary targets are highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia, central eurasia, the middle east and sub-saharan Africa, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact; this means our interface is identical to Wikipedia and usable by non-technical people. We have received over 1.1 million documents so far. We plan to numerically eclipse the content the english wikipedia with leaked documents.

Open government is strongly correlated to quality of life. Open government answers injustice rather than causing it (plans which cause injustice are revealed and opposed before implementation). Open government exposes, and so corrects, corruption. Historically, the most resilient form of open government is one where leaking and publication is easy. Public leaking, being an act of ethical defection to the majority, is by its nature a democratising force.

[via William Heath]

Technorati Tags: freedom_of_expression, government, wiki

That P-word again

Mike Butcher reports on Ester Dyson joining the board of Midentity, whose Etribes "Digital Lifestyle Aggregator" (DLA) takes "user-privacy" as a differentiating feature:

...

DLAs are coming out at a prodigious rate now and it remains to be seen if the ‘privacy’ approach of etribes will capture the public’s imagination. And of course, you have Marc Canter and his PeopleAggregator.net project espousing the ideas of ‘openness’, so it’s interesting to see a figure like Dyson go down what is effectively the opposite route.

I also used to believe the net would have to evolve to encompass "privacy", in the traditional sense of the word—the concealment of information from others. But clearly, with the inexorable growth of blogs, MySpace and YouTube etc. is coming an information free-for-all.

It seems to me that if we are to have "privacy" online, we will have to re-invent the concept as being about re-framing (freely-available) information about each other with respect, and in the context of pervasive reputation for one's actions.

The age of hiding information is passing. So are services like Etribes not just trying to hold back the tide with respect to their privacy features? I note that privacy-focused social bookmarking service BlueDot.com is struggling to gain market share, despite offering an excellent service.

[Also written in comments on source post]

Technorati Tags: privacy

Drowning or surfing?

Some sobering thoughts from Danah Boyd on advertising, bullying, and mobile in 2007:

I love the idea of "social network fatigue." ... Users aren't going to tire of their friends but they will tire of problematic social spaces that make hanging out with friends difficult.

Now, i'm not one to enjoy spouting predictions (notice discomfort in recent press interview) but i have to say that i agree with 80% of Fred Stutzman's predictions. Social network sites as we know it are not the end-all-be-all. They will fade and other services will recognize the value in adding social features to their site. Social network structures will become as ubiquitous as search or profiles. They will be a given, either explicitly ("are you my friend?") or implicitly (your phone contact list). That said, i think there are going to be some blood baths next year and i'm not looking forward to them.

For me, the question is: "are teenagers tiring of the highly-visible social network sites?" and the answer is both yes and no. The level of emotional enthusiasm i hear has dramatically faded over the last six months. It's taken for granted that it's the way to reach people, but folks have seen the pros and cons and are no longer slurping it up without thinking. The perceived presence of people who hold power over teens (parents, teachers, etc.) and those who want to prey on them (marketers, pedophiles, etc.) has done unbelievable damage in general teen perception.

...

More significantly, MySpace has turned into a massive zit full of marketing puss. Most teens don't mind advertising but when things look more like spam than advertising, you're in deep shit. Every PR organization and marketing arm is leeching onto MySpace like a blood thirsty vampire. Problem is that vampires kill their prey. Teens who wanna hang with friends are mostly protecting themselves by privatizing their profile (more cuz of the marketing predators than the sexual ones) but this quickly loses the luster, particularly when it's fundamentally hard to do what you want to communicate with your friends. (Simple things like friend management and better messaging tools would go a long way.) I'm very worried about how, unregulated, spamming and over-advertising will kill even the coolest social hangouts. I keep wondering what the regulation solution will have to be. (Is it law or code cuz it ain't gonna be market or social norms?)

...

I think 2007 is going to be spent working through issues of public life and privacy mixed together complicated power dynamics between generations and between producers and consumers. We're going to see legal battles, big corporate power plays (a.k.a. "bullying"), and media panic coverage meant to distract us from Iraq. We're going to see a disgusting increase in consumer advertising that will aim to saturate everything possible. (This is what you get for getting "old media" and "old business" online finally.) Personally, when i turn up the futurism dial, i wanna hide under a rock in 2007. Of course, it shall be interesting and i won't be able to resist peeking.

Hum, whither "privacy", when kids start publishing videos of their parents fighting!? Definitely time to either abandon or re-invent that concept, I'd say: information is only going to flow more freely in 2007.

Technorati Tags: myspace, privacy, spam, teen