Spammed from my own email address

Hum, I just had the dubious pleasure of receiving spam mail from my own email address. Which of course means others may be receiving spam mail from my email address too. Email is so broken, but we still haven't figured out how to fix or replace it.

Garlik raise Series B funding

Looks like Garlik has convinced some more investors that there's money to be made in supersurveillance:

Garlik has raised £6 million pounds in Series B funding from return backers 3i Group and Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures.

Their product:

DataPatrol is a new monthly monitoring service that finds, tracks and monitors your personal information online.

It's the simple and effective way to protect your privacy and identity.

Hum, that's an awful big claim! I reckon I'll have to take their free trial for a spin and report back...

Reflections on Identity Mashup

I enjoyed being on the panel at the Identity Mashup event at the BT Centre, London the other night. Pursuant is a summary of some of the key points that arose and my further thoughts (mostly towards the end).

Tom Ilube spoke about his company Garlik, which aims to help people track information others hold about them. I find this interesting in that it chimes nicely with my musings on supersurveillance (watching what the watchers are watching about us).

Richard Baker talked about the enterprise in general and BT in particular, and the challenge of providing identity-enabled services to a relatively non tech-savvy mass market. He touched on the strategic model of risk, value and convenience that my friend and white paper co-author John Madelin has developed at BT.

Simon Willison told us about OpenID, a technology protocol that obviates the need to remember lots of passwords (or risk using just one) for all the different web services you use by allowing you to authenticate ("sign in") in one place, then have other web services recognise that you have already signed in, rather than you having to sign in separately for each one. (Wow, that concept is really hard to communicate succinctly without visual examples!)

Edgar Whitley of the London School of Economics' Information Systems Group was sceptical about OpenID's accessibility to the masses, expressing concern that technology like the UK government's ID Card will have to be simpler to use than OpenID is if it is to be used at all (there was some disagreement amongst the panel over OpenID's relative ease of use or otherwise—personally, I suspect ongoing innovation will make it progressively even more approachable by non-geeks).

Tony Fish, the discussion moderator, wanted to know where the beef was: where is the value in identity, and who can leverage it? I opined that advertisers found value in being able to build the richest possible picture of a person in order to target adverts at them optimally—which is why Google is making so much money. Conversely, Tom pointed to identity phraudsters who can extract several thousand pounds of value from a target individual (mostly by getting credit) by obtaining just a handful of key data about them.

There were many other interesting points and observations that came up, but there was also a familiar sense in the room of "how the heck does all this fit together in a single, intelligible picture?" I suggested that looking at identity in terms of value could be a way of pulling the many threads together: corporations, government and individuals alike want to realise for themselves the tangible value of identity, and individual people value—to varying degrees according to person and context—privacy, convenience, service personalisation, transparency and pretty much any other attribute of identity-enabled information services you care to name. In other words, we each place particular values on information and the ways it flows or does not flow.

In the summing up, I lobbed a provocative thought into the room: "privacy is dead; long live privacy". Things would be so simple if we didn't try so desperately to hang on to our little sense of bounded self and melted quietly into the identity soup of this webbed world. That is a scary, scary process—but surely an inevitable one, carried as we little people are on the rip tide of C21st cultural evolution?

That said, money is only a particular kind of information, so the massive imbalances of wealth could not be sustained should we collectively allow information to truly flow freely (as in, in an extreme example, the information that allows me to log into my bank account, although of course I am talking about a far broader spectrum of information value here, most of it only indirectly related to cash!).

It's hard to see the rich letting the poor at their lucre willingly (scary!), and indeed the current trend is massively in the other direction, with megabrands (Tesco, Google, Virgin and so on) increasingly acting as massive re-aggregators of value created by others. So we're left with a huge conundrum—information needs to flow freely to create value, but collectively we're not willing to let it do so beyond specific, highly circumscribed contexts. Indeed, if we did so all at once, our whole ecopolitical system would surely collapse.

This all raises many more questions than it provides answers. One thing's for sure: the dual imperatives of information fluidity and information control look set for some spectacular showdowns over the coming years!

After the main session, I got to chat with a number of interesting people. I felt right at home immersed in a crowd of identity nuts! ; )

For another angle on the Identity Mashup event, check out this thoughtful post by Graham Sadd.

"The Evolution of Human Morality"

Charla and I listened to an interesting podcast on "The Evolution of Human Morality" the other morning. The shownotes:

Incest, infanticide, honour killings - different cultures have different rules of justice. But are we all born with a moral instinct - an innate ability to judge what is right and wrong? Could morality be like language - a universal, unconscious grammar common to all human cultures? Eminent evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser and philosopher Richard Joyce take on these controversial questions in impressive new tomes, and to critical acclaim. But could their evolutionary arguments undermine the social authority of morality? Is biology the new 'religion'?

One insight that emerges from the discussion is that personal and cultural differences in morality tend to exist mainly in the context of relatively complex and context-specific concepts—"the rights of the fetus", for example—whereas simple concepts that underlie such complex concepts, such as "using another person to achieve one's own goals" tend to arouse fairly universal moral responses (negative, in this example).

It seems that we are hard-wired as altruists, but we learn to selectively block our altruistic impulses according to our learned belief systems and our emotional response to others that those belief systems mediate. We learn to identify with the interests and well being of some individuals and groups more than others—and then engage in frantic post-hoc moral self-justification to make ourselves feel ok about that.

So if you'd like to probe your sense of morality, click here to take the Moral Sense Test from the Visual Cognition Laboratory at Havard. I just tried it and learned something interesting about myself (they asked me not to reveal what so as not to bias others' responses!) in about 6 minutes.

Cultural and social aspects of task function

Another intriguing post from Joshua Porter:

In his book The Evolution of Useful Things, Henry Petroski challenges the widely-held notion that “form follows function”. Using the example of knives and forks vs. chopsticks, Petroski shows how the development of eating tools was as much the result of cultural and social issues as about the task itself. Investigating how Eastern and Western cultures have evolved completely different designs that do essentially the same task (conveying food to mouth), Petroski asserts that the difference is crucial.

Ah, but perhaps the question of whether form follows function or not all depends on how narrowly or broadly one defines the function of a “task”? If the task’s function is to convey food to mouth in a way that satisfies cultural and social mores, then the form of the implement—chopstick, fork etc.—exactly follows function. I vote for the application of Occam's Razor here!

"Human 2.0"—unfounded techno-optimism

Nick Carr reports, with seeming credulity:

"The age of Human 2.0 is here," proclaims the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in launching a new Media Lab initiative to create an improved human being.

Sounds like these guys could do with reading up a little on the subtle verities of evolutionary psychology. Oh, but acknowledging the culturally and biologically-embedded nature of our evolution wouldn't make for such a techno-optimistic strapline, I guess. ; )

The blog as the new resumé

Joshua Porter argues, in concordance with Adam Darowsky, that the blog is the new resumé. It's certainly an interesting perspective on blogging, though blogs can be very, a little or not at all professionally focused. In my case, weaverluke blog functions as my "calling card" for my identity work, but there are other professional hats, those of piano teacher and web entrepreneur, that I don't tend to wear here too often. Which is much the same approach as a good resume takes, I guess—that of communicating a particular persona, rather than one's identity as a whole.

Surveillance judo

Bill Thompson ponders, on the BBC News site, the growing shadow of surveillance over our lives:

We're used to reports that the UK is the most-watched country in the world, but we may well look back on the days of simple closed-circuit television with some nostalgia.

This week we've heard reports of 'intelligent CCTV' systems like 'the bug', an array of eight cameras that scan an area and use movement tracking software to look for unusual behaviour, allowing an operator to zoom in on anyone suspicious.

London is planning to follow Middlesbrough in installing cameras with loudspeakers so that anyone thinking of behaving in an inappropriate manner can be hectored from the control room and told what to do, just as the telescreens ordered Winston Smith to do his exercises in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

There is a danger that the art, like other aspects of control technology, will only serve to dull our senses and dampen our indignation

More and more mobile phones come with GPS built-in, a boon for the geographically-challenged but something that could seriously damage our ability to go about our daily lives unobserved.

And of course almost everything we do online is recorded somewhere and will be available for inspection by the police if current EU plans to retain details of all emails sent, websites visited and files downloaded go through into national law.

Yet, despite the scare stories about the potential abuse of this information, we seem remarkably sanguine about the situation.

Millions of people share personal data online, from friendships on Facebook to favourite bands on MySpace, and not forgetting the photos of our friends, family and feet that go up on Flickr and Photobucket.

I'm as bad as anyone here, handing over my shopping patterns to supermarket loyalty schemes; sending unencrypted emails and visiting websites without seeking to disguise my identity; using Google for my searches and wandering the streets, often walking randomly around in a way that is guaranteed to make me look shifty.

It would be nice to think that the legal framework of data protection and human rights would go some way to protect us here, but I fear that we are going to have to take more direct action rather than rely on the Information Commissioner.

Direct action yes, but opposition is not necessarily the only kind of effective action here. In some surveillance situations it may be more creative and effective to act judo-style, going with the trend towards ever-greater surveillance rather than opposing it. For example, this is what initiatives like MySociety's FOI filer and archive are about—helping us to find out what information government holds on us.

So yes, let's engage in a debate on what is appropriate for the watchers to watch, but let's also insist on watching what the watchers are watching about us. Let's trancend surveillance with supersurveillance!

Is Justin Timberlake the product of Cumulative Advantage?

Joshua Porter blogs about a study by Duncan Watts called "Is Justin Timberlake the product of Cumulative Advantage?" (the title being a shrewd piece of Search Engine Optimisation if ever I saw it ; ). The study describes "a sociology experiment that has huge implications for the display of aggregate data on social web sites". In Joshua's words:

Aggregate displays are everywhere, from the book ratings at Amazon.com to the most-emailed articles at the New York Times to the number of diggs at Digg.com. They’re a primary element of social design. They not only let people know how their actions relate to others, but they also alter the behavior of those who view them.

...

[The] result [of the study] could be seen as a confirmation of the bandwagon effect, a known bias resulting from our tendency to follow the crowd. This bias is probably the result of ignorance…if we don’t know something we tend to rely on the opinion of others. In this case users probably paid attention to the download numbers because they didn’t have any prior experience with the music.

We identify with things and people we see others identifying with. Like super-intelligent sheep. Ok, the super-intelligent bit is moot. ; )

Happy St George's Day!

photo by mafleen.

In affirmation and celebration of my English national identity—Happy St George's Day to my readers one and all!

It looks like we urban English at least have a rather ambivalent relationship to our national day. According to Metro newspaper's new Urban Life survey, "one in three urbanites has no idea that today is St George's Day" (and I was amongst them till I chanced upon the article!):

• 9% of people think England's national day was last month
• 5% plan to celebrate it next month

However:

• Two thirds of us will drink to St George today
• 62% of men know the date of the day, compared to 57% of women
• Younger professionals aged 18—24 have the least idea of when the day is
• Two thirds of people think the English should be more patriotic on St George's Day
• 83% think it should be a national holiday

And after all that, apparently "St George was reputedly a Roman soldier who lived in what is now Turkey... historians think that it is highly unlikely that he visited England".

Bah. Bring on the dragons!

Bonus link: some nice "Celebrating England" stamps published today to mark the occasion.

Meeting another L. Razzell

I had the pleasure of meeting another L. Razzell for the first time in my life on Friday—a certain Lorraine Razzell, whose family come from Pinner, Middlesex. Lorraine and I didn't know of any direct family relationship between us, although I shall ask my dad to ask around the family just in case. It was a very odd feeling to be face to face with someone else who goes by the same abbreviated monicker! After all, I have never met another Razzell who is not directly related to me, let alone one who shares my initial.

Google wants your voice print

Now Google wants our voice prints!? That Google identity walled garden is getting more verdant by the day, and the little doorway ever more overgrown...

Billboards as whiteboards?

Sam Sethi picked this up:

Boing Boing is reporting that in December, 2006, the mayor of the 11-million-person Brazilian city of Sao Paolo banned all outdoor billboard advertising, citing advertisers’ unwillingness to comply with the city’s rules on what sort of billboards can be placed where.

Now the rule is in effect, and Flickr user Tony de Marco has documented the eerie sight of a city stripped bare of commercial visuals.

Imagine if Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, ever found out!

What a powerful image—it brings home to me just how omnipresent adverts are in urban spaces. Maybe Sao Paolo should turn the billboards into giant whiteboards (with facilitating stepladders and giant marker pens) upon which citizens could collaboratively brainstorm their vision for the evolution of the city? ; )

Self and Identity as Memory

"Self and Identity as Memory", by John F. Kihlstrom, Jennifer S. Beer and Stanley B. Klein of University of California, is a fascinating (albeit densely condensed) survey of philosophical, cognitive and behavioural psychological and neurological research findings that establish the basis of our sense of self and identity in our memory (as the paper's title suggests).

The authors do an admirable job in pulling together myriad strands of narrative (their diverse research sources) into a coherent whole, and there are many intriguing insights along the way—for instance, on the mutually-discrete nature of semantic and episodic memory, and on the possible existence of a separate brain module for self-awareness (as opposed to awareness of others). All the same, I couldn't help feeling that the authors were having to work pretty hard to get all their material to hang together—as if they were trying to facilitate a discussion by a hundred blind men groping their way around an elephant towards a consensus on what the elephant actually is.

Such is the slippery beast of identity... ; )

Legal ruling on information transparency

BBC News reports:

A new ruling, which said a college had breached a woman's privacy by secretly monitoring her emails, means employers cannot spy on staff, say legal experts.

Lynette Copland, who works at Carmarthenshire College in west Wales, successfully sued her employer for breaching the Human Rights convention.

She was awarded more than £6,000 by the European Court of Human Rights.

Employment law solicitor Alison Love said if employers were going to monitor emails they must tell their employees.

It's interesting to note that the ruling doesn't outlaw the spying altogether, but rather obligates employers to do it transparently. More a victory for the inexorable tide of information freeflow than for "privacy", then?

Gapminder—geographical identity visualisation

Seamus McCauley points us to what is effectively a geographical identity visualisation tool.

Here's a lovely bit of design and presentation - the Gapminder tool from the Gapminder foundation. It plots all sorts of demographic and economic data from different countries on a chart over time, so you can see for example how life expectancy plots against per capita income or how the gender balance in schools relates to Internet users per thousand. Fascinating. Reminds me a little of my favourite tine-series design ever, the BBC's US elections since 1948 map.

Why not have a play? It's an intriguing experience (hint: you have to press "PLAY", after selecting some options, to see it working).

Watching what the watchers are watching

If the act of watching others is called "surveillance", and that of watching the watchers "sousveillance", what could we call it when we watch the watchers watching us, as if over their shoulders—in other words, when we watch what the watchers are watching?

As we become surveilled in more and more moments of our lives, the typical absence of such transparency around surveillance is becoming a huge issue for society. However, I am not aware of a word that describes overseeing what the watchers are watching about us.

How about co-opting "supersurveillance" from its current usage as a mere superlative of surveillance?

Netvibes Universe—personally branded portals

Sam Sethi reports on the new Netvibes Universe:

This afternoon Netvibes will announce the launch of Netvibes Universe, allowing users to create highly customized versions of Netvibes and publish them for public access.

Netvibes has created 100 or so branded versions for the launch - users will be able to create these in about six weeks. In addition to making the page public, publishers can also highly customize their Universe page by adding their own CSS and HTML.

This sounds like a pretty powerful way to re-aggregate the web through the filter of your own identity, in terms of your personal interests and "brand". I shall experiment with interest...

Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality

Found via Andy Sack:

Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality

Each item was purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort. It is an accurate representation in every case. Shiny, neon-orange, liquefied pump-cheese, and all.

I don't think this was the response intended by the blogger of these images, but I really don't know which one is more repellent to me. So there is at least some kind of branding consistency across the two, from my perspective. ; )

Visual identity mashups

From Joi Ito:

A subway mirror with an ad. In Web20-ese that's "Advertising driven user generated media".

I like this kind of visual identity mashup. It's much like the reflectoporn craze of 2004—a remixing of branded product, or in this case branding message, with the intimately personal.

Shopping 2.0

I couldn't resist passing on this quirky video (via Ivan), even though the in-crowd "web 2.0" references will be lost on my non-geek readers. The concept of free-tagging supermarket products with keywords and phrases chimes nicely with the concerns of my previous posts on product identity.

Staying anonymous on the web

BBC News reports on the dangers for bloggers in countries with repressive regimes exposing their identity, even pseudonymously, and offers some anonymisation tips:

The internet has given the individual unprecedented power to reach out to millions but some governments are cautious, even hostile, to giving their citizens free access to ideas they deem too democratic and dangerous.

Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia: they are all popular with holiday makers but they also censor and even lock up journalists and bloggers.

This is why the media rights group, Reporters Without Borders, has published The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents.

...

So what do you do if you want to escape detection from authorities who might not like your work as much as you do?

The Handbook is pretty technical but it also contains some simple tips, so you can say what you think without having to worry the censors or cyber-police too much.

Sounds like a must-read for dissident bloggers the world over. And it reminds me that freedom of speech is still a privilege.

Google's defacto "identity system"

Scott Lemon discovers that "Google wants MORE of your identity!":

Well FINALLY, Google adds the ability to annotate and more [on Google Maps] through their new My Maps features ... BUT ... I MUST create an account and be tracked by Google in order to use the features!! What the heck? I can't just hack out a quick annotated map for a friend or family without providing information to Google about who I am and having them permanently note my interest in some specific point on earth?

Once again ... the average person has NO idea they are now going to have even more records kept of every place they have marked or annotated, and when they did it. Google continues to gather even more information about you ... who you are ... what you do ... where you do. Amazing.

I know a number of people who are pretty annoyed that they have to use a gmail email account (which they may not even use regularly for email) to access services such as Blogger and Google Groups. I am one of those people!

With the rapid rise of OpenID as a means of individuals integrating their personae across web service providers, I suspect Google's attempt to lock users into Google's own defacto "identity system" could become a real competitive weakness for them at some point.

Identity Theft—the movie

A stirring tale of jealousy, soul-searching and brutality. All in 4 minutes 48 seconds.

An ID Cards revolt?

The Times reports:

The government is predicting that some 15m people will revolt against Tony Blair’s controversial ID card scheme by refusing to produce the new cards or provide personal data on demand.

The forecast is made in documents released by the Home Office under the Freedom of Information Act. The papers show ministers expect national protests similar to the poll tax rebellions of the Thatcher era, with millions prepared to risk criminal prosecution.

Opposition MPs said the new documents proved their case that the programme would never work. David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: “This will cripple the system. Fifteen million is a massive number. What the Home Office is accepting in private, but refuses to accept in public, is that a massive number of ordinary law-abiding citizens simply will not go along with their scheme.”

Davis, whose party’s policy is to scrap the cards, added: “This will render it completely useless as a security or check mechanism of any sort.”

The documents, quietly released during parliament’s Easter break, also show that the government is planning to make ID cards compulsory in 2014, despite the expected revolt.

The first cards are due in 2009, alongside new passports. Labour has said it will make the scheme compulsory if it wins the next election.

The ID card scheme could be an election loser for Gordon Brown, make no mistake about it. And given the way that the current Labour government has consistently dodged the opportunity to foster an informed public debate about the scheme's huge ramifications for information control and transparency in society, it's hard to feel too sympathetic.

Speaking at Identity 2.0 Mashup event

I'll be sitting on the panel for the Identity 2.0 Mashup event at the BT Centre in London on the evening of April 24th. The theme is "my digital identity is an asset but who owns it?" I have a feeling we will be unpacking the concept of ownership (if not necessarily those of identity and digital identity) in our attempts to come up with some interesting answers to that question. If you're in London on the 24th, why not come along and pitch in your insights?

Semi-identical twins

From INQUIRER.net:

Stunned geneticists have discovered a pair of twins who are somewhere between identical and non-identical, the British science journal Nature reported on Monday.

The world's only known case of "semi-identical" twins almost certainly arose from two sperm cells that fused with a single egg, it said.

The ground-breaking toddlers comprise an infant who is a hermaphrodite, meaning that it has both male and female genitalia, while the other is a boy whose sexual organs have developed normally.

"Their similarity is somewhere between identical and fraternal twins," said Vivienne Souter, lead author of the study, reported on Nature.

The babies were born in the United States, but their location and their identity have not been disclosed. They have almost no hope of survival.

Sad that they will die. Life is crazy.

Web site über-identities

Fred Wilson riffs on Rich Skrenta's observations about the standardisation of web site types:

Rich Skrenta points out the web pages have begun to be standardized.

Back in 1995, when the web was new, visitors to a new site would lean forward, squint at the page, and try to figure out how it worked.

That metaphor didn't last. People don't lean forward and squint at web pages to figure out how they work anymore. They instantly recognize -- within 100 milliseconds -- which class of site a page belong to -- search result, retail browse, blog, newspaper, spam site, message board, etc. And if they don't recognize what kind of page they're on, they generally give up and hit the back button.

That's an interesting observation and I think its true... Maybe the web has become like every other media before it. It's developing its own categories of services. In television, a show is a sitcom, a drama, a news show, etc, etc. It doesn't take very long to figure out what kind of TV show you are watching.

Is this good or bad? Has most of the innovation on the web already happened? Are we now in mainstream mode, sucking as much cash out of a mature model as we can?

I am not entirely sure. There have been a number of new web page metaphors successfully introduced in the past five years. The wiki style, the blog style, the web video page, the photo page model, etc. I think we aren't done with innovating, but it's interesting to think that the web has become so standardized in such a short time. Just a bit over ten years and it's certainly not the chaotic adventureland it once was.

We could recast this issue in terms of identity. There is a natural tension between the attraction to users, from an ease-of-use point of view, of websites which conform to a stable über-identity (a "blog" a "wiki" a "news site" and so forth) on one hand and the lure of innovative, sometimes useful, yet often disorientating website features on the other ("is it a video site? Is it a splog? Is it a plane?").

Of course, the huge majority of innovative site types languish or die with the pioneer site itself—they may offer marginally or even significantly improved utility over the standard models, but not sufficiently so to counterbalance the cost to the user of learning a new set of interactive metaphors. Sadly, thousands of "web 2.0" sites fall into this category.

It is only when a site type that offers a particular demographic a readily comprehensible, compelling and radically differentiated value proposition in comparison to existing site types arrives or evolves that the status quo of stable website über-identities is disrupted. Blogger and Typepad did it for blogs; Wikipedia and Mediawiki for wikis; Digg and Reddit (and others) for content rating services.

That is not to say, however, that successful website types must be mainstream: with the explosion of the widget universe, there are myriad opportunities for entrepreneurs to target very specific demographics—and particular types of web site may well evolve for very particular market segments. A niche service like MyBlogLog, which serves bloggers and their communities, is a great example here.

Back

A belated "happy Easter!" to my readers. I took a brief blogging break over the holiday weekend, but normal service will now resume.

You are what you phone?

Nielsen Media has been asking some Australians about mobile identity—or rather, the identity of mobiles:

If you're carrying a Motorola mobile phone the chances are you are under 24 and fashion conscious.

But if you've got a Nokia in your pocket (or briefcase), it's a fair bet you might be a family-minded, middle-aged manager.

Sony Ericsson handsets are favoured by ambitious young men trying to make their mark; LGs are tops with mums; while Samsungs are wielded by young women focused on their career, a study of mobile phone usage shows.

Nielsen Media Research associate director Mr Jody Loughlin said all makes of mobiles had a wide spread of customer types but some groups were more attracted to certain brands than others.

Hum, am I really an ambitious young man trying to make my mark? Or does the insight only apply to Australians? And is 34 young these days? ; )

Consciousness and attention: not invariably linked

From Science Daily:

University College London researchers have found the first physiological evidence that invisible subliminal images do attract the brain's attention on a subconscious level. The wider implication for the study, published in Current Biology, is that techniques such as subliminal advertising, now banned in the UK but still legal in the USA, certainly do leave their mark on the brain.

...

Dr Bahrami, of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the UCL Department of Psychology, said: ... "This is exciting research for the scientific community because it challenges previous thinking -- that what is subconscious is also automatic, effortless and unaffected by attention. This research shows that when your brain doesn't have the capacity to pay attention to an image, even images that act on our subconscious simply do not get registered."

The research challenges the theory of the pioneering American psychologist and philosopher, William James, (1842--1910), who said: "We are conscious of what we attend to -- and not conscious of what we do not attend to".

The team's findings show that there are situations where consciousness and attention don't go hand in hand.

So we can be busy identifying the world around us, by paying active attention to it, and yet not be conscious of that process. Interesting.

Moo-ed!

Here are the nine designs I have created for my 100 Moo cards, which are now on order.

Each design highlights a different aspect of this blog's overarching subject, identity, with an appropriate quotation from my blog posts. Hopefully, specific cards will help me to convey to each person I network with the relevance of identity to their own field of interest—identity does have amazingly broad relevance, but then again, people's eyes tend to glaze over unless you can make it relevant to them personally.

I used Photoshop to create the designs, which was pretty straightforward. The card creation process on the Moo site was also very simple in general, although I found that every time I wanted to edit my order details, the site wiped my credit card details (without warning), which was a bit annoying. All in all, I found Moo a fun and useful service. The real proof, of course, (of Moo and of my design skills!) will be in the quality and effectiveness of the printed cards themselves.

Continuous Augmented Attention

Jamais Cascio coins the phrase "Continuous Augmented Attention", his proposed salve for Continuous Partial Attention. Nice post. Just so long as I can still take the occasional break to gaze at the clouds and the flowers, Jamais?

Racial identity in the media

Saiful Bahri Kamaruddin writes about the crude representation of racial identity prevalent in the mainstream media:

“After having many talks with my mother about the issue, she reinforced what she had always taught me. She said that even though you are half-black and half-white, you will be discriminated against in this country as a black person...” – Halle Berry

...

The latest evidence of the media’s unwillingness to recognize racial diversity is the case of a young British racing car driver who gained almost instant fame in the racing world on April 25, which should not have been for the color of his skin. Finishing third in Melbourne, the 22-year-old became the first Formula One rookie since 1996 to appear on the winner’s podium. His name is Lewis Hamilton and he is of mixed racial parentage and light brown skin color, with features which cannot readily be categorized. Yet various media, not least that US standard of correctness, the Associated Press, and most of the media in Australia insisted on describing him as the “first black” Formula One driver.

Bloomberg called Hamilton “Formula One's first black driver, (who) finished third on his race debut in Australia to underline his potential and rebuff doubters who said he was promoted too soon.”

Quite clearly Hamilton is no more or less black or white than Halle Berry, who was acclaimed not long ago as the first “black” woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress. This is not merely inaccurate as a physical description. It must be viewed with some puzzlement, to say the least, by her mother who is a very white person from England.

The notion that anyone who has some black African blood is therefore “black” is perhaps the most evident sign of how deeply rooted racism remains in the US and Australia, including in the pages of supposedly liberal newspapers. (The British media has, to its rare credit, mostly chosen to adopt Hamilton as a new sporting hero without always defining him in racial terms).

The black/white categorization in the US remains as entrenched as ever despite the best efforts of Tiger Woods to focus attention not on his “black” identity but on the diversity of his background. Woods’ refusal to be thus classified was not only correct, to have done otherwise would have been to deny the identity of his mother, a Thai with part Chinese ancestry.

The mainstream media craves a simple message to sell. And that means forcing people's identity into black or white boxes, amongst many other kinds of boxes.

Moo cards

Moo is a natty service that allows you to create 100 little business cards for £10, where each of the cards can have a unique design or image. For me, this nicely reflects the way we are increasingly understanding and performing our identity in a rich and multifaceted way—as well as being fun!

I decided to have a go at using Moo to create a set of weaverluke cards, each of which will show a different "identity" quote from this blog. Then I can give appropriate cards out to each individual I network with—an "identity politics" card to a political journalist, an "identity and value" card to an investor and so on. Maybe I'll even put the individual blog post URL (web address) after each quote... Lots of possibilities...

Right, time to go trawling the archives for those quotes!

Another identity-related blog

I just discovered Ryan Lanham's blog, Identity Unknown, which is about "mashup, theory and opinion on ecologies, cultures, societies and individuals coping with identity in an Age of Unintended Consequences."

The blog's "topics" page gives a more detailed description of its remit:

What is the tie that binds across this admittedly eclectic blog?

In a word, it’s identity–but that word is vague at best. What I am about here is studying and reporting on the melting I see (that is, theorize) going on in various institutional and organizational forms during the current time of extensive global and technological interaction. My wife hears a lot about melting chocolate…melting shaving foam and the like.

I am also interested in the moral issues this institutional melting raises, particularly for realizing public action. That is, I worry about fading government institutions, proliferating jurisdictions, complex public networks of action, and public-private sorts of partnerships and their inadequacies.

Unlike many public administration scholars, I don’t seek to revitalize old institutions. Rather, I’d like to see them through to transformations that are sustainable and productively dynamic. You might say that I am trying to make sure that no one gets burned in the melting process however it may go.

Structures create borders. So I also worry about border disputes of various sorts such as those between “sectors” and other “imagined” categories. This takes me into conflicts and their resolvers of all sorts. As such, I study nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurship and a strange type of quasi-organization that eschews identity for action–I call these “post-organizations.” They include forms like community foundations, which is my dissertation topic. These post-organizations operate so as to downplay identity in favor of innovation–a very new concept, I think. I am big on enabling versus solving–I see them as points on a continuum of sorts.

I view innovation as approximately an inverse to social structure. Following actor-network-theory, I refer to the relationships that hold in a given situation for a given person (or an actant or group), as an ontology. That is a key term on this blog. Strong ontologies make innovation difficult. Strong ontologies=structure.

Overall, I think in terms of many co-operational and conflicting ontologies being in play all at the same time. We live in an ontology soup. It can either mesh gently or like a bunch of unsynchronized bits of steel.

In my theory, when an ontology fails to support a situation for the one applying a given version, the person/actant/group who thought they had it all together is thrust into dissonance–a sense of psychological unease. That cognitive dissonance leads to innovations. Innovation is thus the attempt to make ontologies more inclusive to absorb new situations.

Structure works in the opposite way but toward the same end. It prevents dissonance by enacting the same rules over and over again. While very efficient when things are relatively stable, structure doesn’t work very well in a time of uncertainty and interaction. Classic structure, in this sense of the term, is a bureaucracy in a corporation or government. But it is also as much found in the strict religious teachings of a fundamentalist sect. Anything that locks thinking is structure.

Surrounding an ontology are borders of boundary objects–another key term in this blog. A boundary object is something that is contested between ontologies. Thus, any ontological relationship or fact held by a person could be a boundary object with someone else’s ontology in any given situation–that is, everything can be contested by someone. Such contests also cause dissonance and thus also contribute to innovations when the conflicts arise in different situations.

“Strong ontologies,” e.g. orthodox faiths, reiterate certain key ontological boundary objects that underscore how that strong ontology is expected to be applied in various situations by its masters. Strong ontologies tend to isolate themselves and those who apply them. Consequently, they don’t work well in ages such as ours. Weak ontologies tend to be exploratory, but they have a tough time surviving very long. It is almost like the cell walls of plant cells versus animal cells. One is forceful, the other mobile. Both can find niches and thrive under various circumstances–a reason I am interested in ecology and evolution.

As I have already suggested, we are in an age where there is, in general, much greater interaction (e.g. globalization and Web 2.0). This age is causing much friction between various ontologies and the identities they support. As such, there are many identity-related crises and counter-crises of nationalism, fundamentalism, terrorism, classism, racism, etc.

I take no specific position regarding most ontologies. But I do tend to hold very weak boundary objects myself. I also respect, or try to respect, those with deep beliefs of one sort or another. I am generally inclined toward a pragmatic tolerance. I have my biases and boundaries, too.

The topics I treat in Identity Unknown relate to the milieu of all these considerations. I’d be happy to have your comments or, if you are truly engaged, your contributions.

This all sounds most interesting, and the focus on ontologies is right up my street. However, when I subscribed to the blog's feed, I found that very many of the posts (of which there are very many) make no explicit mention of identity itself. This seems to be mainly a link blog, with content very loosely constellated around "identity", with the occasional bit of commentary from Ryan. I shall give it a good try out in my aggregator and report back on anything of particular interest to identity truth seekers.

The identity of money

Michael Williams asks what the difference really is between "real" and "virtual" money:

The line between "virtual" money and "real" money is very fuzzy, especially in an age where even real money is earned and spent mostly electronically. I get my paycheck directly deposited to my bank account, I manage that account through a website, I spend the money with a credit card, and I pay off the credit card through another website. I rarely handle cash, even for very small transactions. So what's the difference between a Chinese yuan and a QQ coin?

HONG KONG -- China's fastest-rising currency isn't the yuan. It's the QQ coin -- online play money created by marketers to sell such things as virtual flowers for instant-message buddies, cellphone ringtones and magical swords for online games. ...

Then last year something happened that Tencent hadn't originally planned. Online game sites beyond Tencent started accepting QQ coins as payment. The coins appeal as a safer, more practical way to conduct small online purchases, because credit cards aren't yet commonplace in China.

At informal online currency marketplaces, thousands of users helped turn the QQ coins back into cash by selling them at a discount that varies based on the laws of supply and demand. Traders began jumping into the QQ coin market as an opportunity to make a quick yuan off of currency speculation.

State-run media reported that some online shoppers began using QQ coins to buy real-world items such as CDs and makeup. So-called QQ Girls started accepting the coins as payment for intimate private chats online. Gamblers caught wind, too, and started using the currency to get around China's anti-gambling laws, converting wins in online mahjong and card games back into cash. Dozens of third-party trading posts sprouted up to ease transactions, turning the QQ coin into a kind of parallel currency.

The only thing that separates QQ coins from yuans is that the former isn't issued by a government... but then that's never been a requirement in the definition of "money".

Michael goes on to explore Wikipedia's definition of money, and there's an interesting post comment on the same topic by Francis Porretto. One thing's for sure, though: when the tax man comes knocking on your virtual door, you'll know that your Linden Dollars or QQ coins are the real money deal.

Hit and run

I was coming out of the Apple Store on Regents Street on Friday afternoon, chatting to a friend on my mobile, when suddenly I heard a great crunch and the roar of a car engine. A black Range Rover had careened around the corner of Hanover Street onto Regents Street and smashed into the back of a bus. But far from stopping there, the driver swerved around the bus across oncoming traffic and accelerated precipitously towards Oxford Circus, very nearly hitting two pedestrians as it went.

The whole front bumper of the Range Rover had come off and was lying on the street corner. The bus driver got out of his bus and said to me: "that road is one way in the other direction!" (seemingly, the car driver had already been in a hurry to escape from something or someone before hitting the bus—perhaps they were a joyrider?) The bus driver walked down towards the crash site. I turned to the two shaken pedestrians who had nearly been hit and said: "don't worry, the car is bound to have been recorded on [surveillance] camera, they'll soon catch the driver."

Then I saw the bus driver walking back to his bus, carrying the car's number plate with him.

Talk about identifying evidence!

Wikipedia on "Value"

I just looked up Wikipedia's definition of "value" and found an intriguing collection of articles:

• Value (mathematics) -- the value of a variable in mathematics.
• Value (personal and cultural) -- the principles, standards, or quality which guides human actions
• Value (economics) -- the market worth or estimated worth of commodities, services, assets, or work.
• Value theory -- in ethics, aesthetics and other evaluative matters
• Value (marketing)
  
• Value (computer science)
• Value (law)
• Value (semiotics)
• Value (colorimetry) -- a measure of white or black in color

I think I'll take a good look at these and anything else interesting on the subject I can find—I'm thinking of writing a blog post series constellated around value as a central concept. It feels like that's the direction my thinking about identity is inexorably leading me, so I figured I might as well roll up my sleeves!

Plaudits

Some kind words that have been written about me:

"Weaverluke is a remarkable read any day"
Kim Cameron — Architect of Identity and Access, Microsoft Connected Systems Division

"Luke is an extremely intelligent and creative thinker, bringing great insight into complex subjects."
John Madelin — Head of UK Practice - Business Continuity, Security, and Governance, BT Global Services

"If you want to keep up with the latest thinking on identity, a good place to start is weaverluke."
Alex Newson — IP and Technology law specialist solicitor and blogger, Freeth Cartwright LLP

"Identity Society['s] organizer is a very clued in [person,] Luke Razzell—someone whose views I have a lot of respect for."
Ajit Jaokar — author and speaker on Mobile Applications, founder of futuretext and Chair of Oxford University's Next generation mobile applications panel

"A deep thinker in [the identity] area."
Graham Sadd — CEO, PAOGA Identity Management

"weaverluke ... [an] excellent blog."
Seamus McCauley — Chief Internet Strategist, Daily Mail Group

"One of my favorite identity bloggers."
Kermit Snelson, Subjectivity blog