The social web is not a machine—it is (evolving into) us

Chris Brogan wonders if the social web could be understood as a machine that we can learn to "program".

After adding a couple of rather emotive comments that didn't respond fairly to Chris's whole post (I've learned to open my mouth before thinking too much these days—I rarely regret it in the long run!), I managed to say what I really meant:

@Chris- My point (clumsily made, for which apologies) is that the programming metaphor only goes so far in encapsulating our activity on the social web, because we are (hopefully) not just using the social web as a “machine” to achieve a particular, pre-planned outcome that we desire (a blog in the Technorati Top 100, a new consultancy contract etc.), but rather are embedded in a complex and quite mysterious world of cybernetically-extended human relationship.

It’s only when we give up “knowing” where we are going or need to go that we open ourselves up to truth, surely? And your positivistic programming metaphor doesn’t seem to me to foster this kind of Zen Mind state.

All that said, the social web *is* at a stage right now where we do need “programming” skills just to use the damn thing, motivations not-withstanding. So from that point of view, absolutely I agree with the utility of your metaphor.

Let’s just not forget the larger goal—of facilitating the evolution of the web such that it comes to be transparent to our time and space-shifted *human* communication. : )

Powerful metaphors need judicious useage.

Identity, embodied

It's hard to believe that I was posting up to three times daily on this blog just a few months ago. Since dedicating myself to creating, launching and growing Blog Friends with Jof and Benjie in June this year, my to-do list has been continuously overflowing with design, administrative and business tasks, leaving little room in my schedule let alone my head for "identity" blogging.

That said, the real problem has not been a lack of time—it's been a profound shift of point of view on my part. For three years, I was on the outside looking in on the world of web-enabled business. Sitting on a cloud at 15,000 feet and surveying the landscape stretching out below me became a comfortable habit, and the resulting insights and musings ended up on weaverluke blog.

Not that I wasn't working diligently throughout those three years to realise my "i-together" vision of a world where each individual could explore and express their unique identity in rich community contexts. Far from it: I dedicated much of my spare time and my life savings (and then some), to create with various programmers three prototype applications of that vision, and wrote any number of supporting business plan drafts. Then Facebook's Platform came along, and I realised that there was a great market opportunity for a very specific aspect of the i-together vision—the social blog post sharing and discovery service that is now Blog Friends.

Soon afterwards Jof, Benjie and I launched Blog Friends into the world, rapidly gaining real users with real opinions and preferences. There were suddenly a million things to do by yesterday just to keep the service running, let alone planning and building new service features, iterating the business plan, networking with potential employees, partners and investors, and lastly—but actually most importantly—communicating one-to-one with our wonderful and loyal users.

June, July, August, September, October... The months have sped by and weaverluke blog has languished. It feels rather ironic that I've co-created a service for bloggers and blog readers, yet seem to have lost my own blogging mojo so catastrophically! We also now have a blog for Blog Friends itself that will need tending.

So how could what weaverluke blog has been transition into something that supports and is fed by what my life has become? In other words, what's the common thread (a weaver always needs a thread) that runs through my passions for identity and for Blog Friends?

Considering that question for a moment, I realise that as we adjust the designs for Blog Friends v1 by a pixel here, a shade of blue there, and as we plough through the nitty gritty numbers of the i-together business plan, it is all too easy for me to forget what so excited me about i-together and Blog Friends in the first place.

We are all preciously unique, but we have so much in common too. We thrive when we acknowledge and celebrate both our individuality and our commonalities.

I wanted to create a service that taps into these insights to help people discover and share stuff that really interests them, easily and intuitively. And I really feel that with the forthcoming "v1" release of Blog Friends, we are getting a whole lot closer to that goal.

V1 introduces a full-page feed reader, rich feedback options to tune your topic and author preferences and a whole lot more. Jof, Benjie and I have been grafting away for a couple of months on v1, and we're just days away from launching it into private beta testing now (do let me know, along with your facebook id please, if you'd like an invitation!).

Anyhow, this rambling and anecdotal post has wandered off topic, just like my mind has wandered from the purity and abstraction of "identity" these last months into the challenge of actually making something with and for real people! Because at the end of the day, it's all about relationship, right, this identity stuff? About sharing your passion and dreams with others, and witnessing them in theirs.

Hopefully, I can start to do some more of that on this blog and at the Blog Friends Blog from now on.

Identity Society—happenings and musings

I found the Mobile Monday "Mobile Digital Identity" event at SUN pretty interesting. Alex Craxton (his report here) did a great job of organising and MD-ing the evening, and the panel session seemed to go well.

As ever, though, the topic of identity quickly escaped the confines of "mobile" and we ended up talking about facebook and its privacy implications! The discussion reminded me a lot of the "Dark Side of Social Media" Chinwag event the other month, with both panel and audience divided between the privacy worriers and the information-must-be-free advocates.

I guess I attempt to span both camps with my "i-together" philosophy, which goes something like this:

It's natural that human beings assert and protect the boundaries of their individual identity in "win-lose" situations (my money, not yours!—"i"); on the other hand, people allow those boundaries to become increasingly permeable to others as they discover mutual interests and common purpose (saving the planet etc.—"together").

The individual and collective aspects of identity look set to weave ever more intricately through one another in our evolving culture, creating all sorts of social patterns at many scales ("i-together"). And networked technologies like facebook and new mobile capabilities are only accelerating the pace of the identity loom's machinations.

A weaver's view, you might say.

Incidentally, Charla and I spent a lovely day with my friend John Madelin and his delightful family yesterday, and John and I took the opportunity to make some good progress on the Identity Society wiki. Do check it out and edit away!

Mobile Digital Identity event at SUN

So I am donning my Identity Society hat on Monday evening and chairing the panel session at the Mobile Monday event on Mobile Digital Identity, held at SUN Microsystems' London HQ.

My friends Dave Birch, Ajit Jaokar and Alan Patrick are amongst the panelists. As I don't pretend to know a great deal about mobile technology, I hope to learn a lot!

Identity & startups: the web (1)

Luke Razzell and Nic Brisbourne

Introduction

This post is the first in a series that explores the strategic relevance of identity for startups (a full introduction to the series, and an link index of the posts, is here).

In a society where people increasingly expect to be able to customise their experiences according to their own tastes and preferences—in other words, to have their life fit around their individual identity—startups must help users to personalise their experience better than their competition does.

The conceptual framework that we will develop through this post series is intended to help anyone who is, or would like to be, involved in building a startup to understand what opportunities, threats and unknowns identity represents for your business. We hope that non-entrepreneurs with an interest in the startup or identity worlds will find much food for thought here also.

The series will span diverse topics—including mobile, branding, law, retail, entertainment, government and mainstream media. But we start with what is arguably the single most important transformative technological innovation of our times, the pervasive digital network—and specifically the web.

I am delighted to have as co-author of this and forthcoming posts on identity, startups and the web reknowned Venture Capitalist and blogger, Nic Brisbourne.

Extending identity across the network

We experience our life through the ever-present lens of our own sense of identity. In fact, without a consistent sense of personal identity, it would be impossible for us to make sense of life at all—particularly given the incredible complexity and pace of change in modern society.

Networked technology offers the extraordinary promise of allowing us to carry our sense of personal identity beyond the geospatial and, to some extent at least, the temporal limitations of the physical world.

These new freedoms have, of course, driven the explosive growth of networked (and in particular, web-based) applications of all kinds, particularly since the advent of the web. In many ways, these applications are making our lives richer and more convenient. More and more, we are able to develop and explore our social connections and our personal interests regardless of where we, our friends or our information sources are.

So virtually far, so good!

However, there is a big catch.

The online "presence integration and privacy" problem

If we compare our offline and online experiences of identity, it becomes clear that networked applications' capacity to mediate our innate and natural ways of experiencing and expressing identity remains rudimentary. While the network gives us abilities to transcend place and time that we (quite literally) only dreamed of before its advent, it is much less good at enabling us to transfer some fundamentals of our offline identity experience into our online life.

How so?

In the physical, face-to-face world, we quite naturally carry our sense of identity about with us, yet we are also highly adept at managing which aspects of that identity we disclose to whom and when (maintaining our sense of privacy). Unfortunately, it turns out that enabling online the same kind of integrated yet privacy-enabled experience of identity that we enjoy in the physical world is a very thorny problem; a problem that has diverse technological, social, business and legal factors—and one that remains largely unsolved.


Perhaps we take an integrated and segmentable experience of our identity so for granted offline that it seems we forgot to design it into the architecture of our digital networks and the applications that run on them? Perhaps the task of constructing a truly identity-enabled network—let's call it an "Identity Web" for brevity's sake—brings up such difficult challenges that we are only beginning to figure out how to do so?

Whatever the reasons for the current identity deficit in our digital networks, we must develop a clear understanding of them if we are to remedy that deficit. Let's start by clarifying the key features that a successful "Identity Web" must exhibit—in the course of which, we will discover a potential, new economic benefit it could provide both to individuals and to the companies that serve them faithfully and transparently.

Four key requirements for an Identity Web

1) Presence integration

The Identity Web must allow us to integrate the various aspects of our presence in order to simplify and enrichen our online experience. This need for integration applies to both the aggregation and federation of personal information (information that is "about me") and personalised information (information that is "of interest to me" or "[co-]created by me").

By way of explanation: whether information represents our name and address, a blog post or photo we created, the data about our interests we tacitly generate as we interact with online services ("attention" data; e.g. our search history and clickstream on Google)—it is all potentially of value to us and we may want to be able to bring all or some of it together for re-publishing, posterity, our own insight and to improve the personalisation of other services we use (news or music recomendation services, for example).

2) Presence segmentation

The Identity Web must allow us to segment others' view of our presence—to present different views of ourselves to different individuals and groups, such as spouse, work and family—if we are to maintain our sense of "privacy". We can already achieve this kind of selective disclosure within the context of specific services—make certain photos we upload to Flickr visible only to family members, for example—but the challenge of providing users with this kind of privacy control over information across distributed and heterogenous services of an Identity Web proves to be much, much more difficult one.

It is worth noting, however, that the whole notion of privacy seems to be changing in our society: children and teenagers, in particular, are happily sharing intimately personal information and images on social networks like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook (albeit often under cover of multiple pseudonyms), and they may well carry these attitudes into their adult life. (Of course, they may also carry forward the stigma of ill-considered, online personal revelations, preserved for posterity in Google's indexes, when they come to look for employment!). It may, then, be more useful to think of presence segmentation in terms of cost-benefit tradeoffs than in terms of the complex and arguably fading concept of "privacy".

3) Online presence that is service and device independent

The Identity Web must support diverse services. We already enjoy a choice of networked services and devices that are both broadly-integrative—such as Apple's iTunes and iPod integrated computer, web and music player technology solution—but also highly-specialised and niche networked services and devices—like Twitter, which focuses solely on publishing timely, short text messages. However, unless we are to give our lives entirely over to a handful of megabrands (or perhaps just Google, ultimately!), the Identity Web must allow us to benefit from choice across diverse niche services while still enjoying the same benefits of presence integration we would get from using suites of services within the "walled gardens" of the major services.

4) The individual as unifying network node

Each of these requirements above have in common another, higher-level requirement: that the individual user should be the only entity that can aggregate and control dissemination of all the information that pertains to their identity. In other words, the user themselves must become the only unifying node in their personal identity network.

And that eventuality gives rise to a very significant commercial opportunity, for both startups and the individuals they serve.

Presence monetisation—a potential benefit of a functional Identity Web

In an Identity Web where the individual effectively becomes the only party who can both integrate and manage the disclosure of the complete set of their presence information (whereas the services the individual deals with can only access a subset of that information), that individual should be able to monetise (directly, or indirectly through discounted or free services) the value of their identity by selling access to the information. By the same token, the mediation of specific aspects of that personal identity information retail process would seem to represent a very large opportunity indeed for startups.

Conclusion

So we have suggested four key requirements for, and a potential business benefit of a functional Identity Web—a necessary overview of the problem space.

However, identifying the high level features of a future Identity Web raises some tough questions:

• What will be the business models that drive the evolution of the Identity Web?

• What are likely to be the technological, business and social drivers, blockers and unknowns that inform startups' strategy in seeking to deploy those business models?

In the following posts in the series, we will dive down into complex, multi-faceted and messy reality of the contemporary web-enabled business world and discover some possible answers to those questions.

Identity and startups: an introduction

Why is understanding identity important for startups?

What strategic relevance does identity have for technology startups? The answer, in a nutshell, is that understanding and catering for people's experience of identity—individuals' unique experience of who or what they, other people, things and information are—seems to be key to understanding how to create and monetise value in our increasingly fluid and personalisable society.

People are coming to expect to be able to customise and integrate more and more areas of their life in their own, individually unique way. To be competitive, startups must work out how to enable that customisation and integration in a way that is radically more effective than their competition. And more often than not, innovations in technology and its applications provide that opportunity.

The problem—a complex topic covered in an inconsistent and piecemeal way

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Just work out how your target users experience identity and build your service accordingly.

However, there's a catch: identity, even in its practical, applied (as opposed to abstractly philosophical) sense, turns out to be a hugely complex and multi-faceted subject, spanning psychology, economics, branding, business theory, law, politics, anthropology and many other fields. You simply cannot reduce identity to any one of these perspectives if you hope to understand it clearly, because identity is something that informs our whole life! Yet while there already exists a good deal of research on and discussion of each niche area of identity studies—much of it of great merit in its own terms—there has been little work done on developing cross-sector approaches to understanding identity.

Where is the poor entrepreneur to start?

The solution—an integrated conceptual framework for startups and identity

What seems to be needed is a clear, comprehensive and integrated conceptual framework within which startups can plan their identity strategy. Such a framework would enable startups to identify opportunities, threats and unknowns that identity represents for their business across commercial, technological, legal and social spheres—in a straightforward and consistent way.

In a forthcoming series of posts over the coming weeks and months, myself and a number of co-authors, each a thought leader in their specialist field, will develop just such an overarching conceptual framework for startups and identity.

We will begin by looking at the opportunities, threats and unknown factors around identity that digital networks—with a special focus on the web—raise for startups. Subsequent posts will go on to explore mobile, governmental, legal, branding, retail, banking, mainstream media and psychosocial aspects of the problem space. Links to each post will appear below as they are published.

I'm looking forward to learning a lot in the process of co-authoring these posts—I hope you will accompany me and my collaborators on the journey, and help us along the way with your comments and criticisms!

Would you pay for your "own" personalised information?

Can you imagine a future where we pay retailers to provide us with copies of the personalised information we generate as we shop (our favourite products and brands, regular purchases and so on), so we can use it to personalise our shopping experience across all the retailers we engage with?

Once you get beyond the moral certainties of information "ownership" in these grey areas of consumer-brand interaction, that kind of business model suddenly looks a whole lot more plausible.

Flooding the personal information market

Glyn Moody on the benefits of enabling supersurveillance through radical openness:

Hm, a novel approach:

So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there's a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. "It's economics," he says. "I flood the market."

Not only effective, but fun, by the sounds of it!

Bob Blakley on Real ID

Writing in response to the DHS’ Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee report on the implementation of the REAL ID Act, Bob Blakley summarises its message in plain language:

The REAL ID act is a bad idea. The problems with the REAL ID act listed in the Committee’s report should not be fixed, because fixing them will not address the core issues the REAL ID act raises. Fixing the problems the Committee has identified will simply produce the best possible version of a very bad system. If the REAL ID act is implemented, there is no chance it will meet its stated goals; there is every reason to believe it will have many unforeseen adverse consquences; and there is every reason to believe its costs will be huge in proportion to its benefits.

I wonder if the US government will listen to its thoughtful critics here as the UK government really has not to date (although there are signs that that may be beginning to change...)?

Privacy, lost and found

photo by weaverluke

What are the chances of an identity nut like me stumbling upon this on an Islington pavement?!

With the exposure of their personal crib note into the public domain, I guess the author has lost a tiny fragment of their (arguable) human right. Ah well, nothing like the University of Life to bring dry academic lessons home! (Although did the note's author really care one jot about the loss, I wonder? Was the note even deliberately discarded after an exam? Perhaps that is the lesson—notions of privacy and the personal only matter to us personally when we feel we have something precious to shield from others?)

A privacy law shambles

Andrew at IMPACT blog points us to an "[i]nteresting article on The Independent website" From the article's introduction:

Legal Opinion: An over-complex privacy law may trigger new legislation

"There may never have been a simple answer to the question: what is the law of privacy? But a recent spate of cases has added to the dense jungle of rulings and legal principles through which even experienced judges are finding it difficult to navigate..."

This topic begs a very thorny question: precisely what constitutes "personal" information? Information is generated as we interact, in a rich, fuzzy and complex way, with one another and with the world around us. Ownership of that information is surely bound to be moot in very many cases...

The City as a Green action focal point

Bruno Giussiani, reporting on a new initiative by the Clinton Foundation to tackle climate change with action around energy efficiency of buildings in cities, summarises "the possible role of big cities in tackling global problems such as climate change":

The basic idea: If cities start acting as global actors towards sustainability, new mobility solutions and traffic strategies, clean energy, water resources management, etc, when you add it all up there could be significant progress even without national policies and international treaties.

I guess we can easily relate to cities both as obvious causes of the climate change problem, with their massive energy use per capita, but also as the creative and entrepreneurial centres that can produce solutions for that problem. It is always easier to galvanise people to action when they can identify clearly with a simple set of concepts and a clearly-defined associated community. It seems that the City is becoming a key focal point in this regard for climate change action.

UPDATE—Jerry Fishenden of Microsoft (who are the technology partner for the Clinton Foundation project) has some intelligent words to say about this issue.

IM bots masquerading as humans

Seamus McCauley observes that on the internet, not many people know that you're a bot:

J: Would you like to hear a joke?
A: Sure, tell me about it.
J: Why don’t blind people skydive?
A: Perhaps it is impossible.

I hear worse jokes told by real people almost every day. And the above, of course, was the product of two chatbots talking to one another (Discover, via BoingBoing).

The Turing test is all very well, but in artificial lab conditions where you've been told to watch out for one robot and one human you've got a 50/50 chance of getting it right just by guessing. People just aren't generally paying that much attention, and at a time when many "people" communicate (almost) exclusively via 160 or even 80 characters of text I'm not at all convinced we'd spot the robots if they made up three-quarters of the online population.

It's not hard to imagine lots of devious phishing applications of these kinds of chat robots—they could be primed to ferret a certain kind of information out of you, such as your shopping preferences.

And the moral of this story? Don't waste your life indulging in the inane drivel of chat rooms, Twitter and so on? ; )

The intrinsic limitations of identifiers

Mike Neuenschwander, wrestling hopefully with OpenID, has encountered there an intrinsic problem with identifiers:

OpenID ... calls into sharp focus something I’ve believed for years. It’s a kind of axiom, so I’d like to give it a name. I’ll call it, “identifiers.axiom.neunmike’s.axiomproxy.info”—that way you can easily refer to it unambiguously from anywhere. Here it is:

There are no identifiers, only attributes

Names are slippery. Most people have many more than one legal name, none of which are unique. They also have several dozen nicknames. There’s no practical way to get any of these every-day-use names onto a global namespace. And what’s a name after all but a synthetic attribute—a foreign key that we hope the receiving party stores somewhere so we can remember them later? Names are invaluable communication aids, but they have little to do with recognition, which is what’s at issue in most identity management contexts. Biologically, creatures don’t recognize others based on names but rather the confluence of attributes appearing within a certain context.

Lao Tzu (who goes by several dozen names) had a pretty good post on this idea over 2000 years ago. In a section called “Ineffability,” he writes:

The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way;
The names that can be named are not unvarying names.
It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind. (chap. 1, tr. Waley)

I understand why from a programmer’s perspective, it would be so much more convenient if everybody could simply have one globally unique, unambiguous, resolvable name. But such a quaint design constitutes a wanton disregard for reality.

The tech industry is adolescently ID-fixated. But I’ve had it to here with IDs! Would somebody please start seeing my avatars as something more than identification objects? So here’s to being an OpenAttribute power user!

I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree with Mike's axiom. I'd go further still, and extend the thought it embodies to its logical conclusion: the location metaphor for digital networks (like the web) that the concept of unique "identifiers" entail is completely unsuited to the modelling of our perceptions of identity—or our imagination—which are themselves not bounded by 3D limitations.

Personal data mining: benefits and costs

Nic Brisbourne has written a thoughtful post called "Mining personal data - the next big frontier":

[Last] week Eric Schmidt of Google said he would help us answer questions like “What am I going to do tomorrow?”. I applaud the sentiment here, I really do, but I don’t think Eric is the right guy for the job, and he certainly isn’t going about it the right way.

A lot of people have a bad reaction when Google does things like this - Does Eric Schmidt want to sniff the armpits of my mind? is a very funny example, and indeed this post was in part inspired by some friends saying at dinner last night how much Schmidt’s arrogance pissed them off.

Underlying all this are some very real privacy concerns which I will come back to, but first I want to focus on how useful these sorts of services could be.

Nic goes on to discuss how some potential benefits to end users of allowing their behaviours and preferences to be tracked in exchange for cheap/free services and better ad personalisation could offset their privacy concerns.

I'm looking forward to chatting with Nic this week in preparation for a post I'm planning on "Identity for web startups—opportunities and threats": I'm sure his insights into the economic aspects of the topic (Nic is a Venture Capitalist at Esprit) will be extremely helpful.

Genomics, privacy and economics

Glyn Moody reports on disquiet around developments in personal genomics:

Good to see some others concerned by the imminent arrival of personal genomics:

In addition, many scientists fear cheap genome sequencing could have other, worrying consequences. Professor Steve Jones of University College London, said: 'If you make your genome public, you are not just revealing information about yourself and what diseases you might be susceptible to, you are also giving away crucial data about the kind of illnesses your children might be prone to. Each of your children gets half your genes, after all. They might not want the world to know about the risks they face and become very unhappy in later life that you went public. Your other relatives might equally be displeased.'

And by its implications for civil liberties:

However, there are other concerns, as Professor Ashburner points out. 'Anyone who commits relatively minor offences can have their DNA taken and analysed. At present, the main use of this process is to create a DNA fingerprint that can be used to identify that individual. But soon we will be able to create an entire genome sequence of that individual from a swab or blood sample. We will end up knowing everything about their genes. In the end, we could have millions of people on a database and know every single genetic secret of each person. That has to be a very worrying prospect.'

We had better think carefully about these issues, for genetic information is, ultimately, just another kind of information, and information wants to be free. Google's investment in a genetics startup is also worth noting. However, given the high value of our personal genetic information, it seems likely to me that we will try to guard and control it much like we do the money in our bank accounts.

One of the biggest strategic uncertainties facing any business, government or organisation these days is that of privacy and its associated economic ramifications:

• how will attitudes towards privacy evolve across society and its constituent demographics?;
• where will each demographic seek to draw lines between high-value, private information and low-value public information?
• what technological, legal, business and social factors could undermine the ability of people to maintain such segmentation between public and private information?
• to what extent will re-aggregation of lots of pieces of low-value information enhance its aggregate value?

No-one knows the answers to these questions yet, but they are among the ones we will need to keep asking ourselves and each other if we are to work together to create a future society we want to live in.

Amendments to the FOI - bad news

Andrew at IMPACT blog laments the impending weakening of Freedom of Information in the UK, as the Bill proposing changes to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for England & Wales and Northern Ireland looks set to progress:

Given that the Freedom of Information regime is, broadly, about the public interest in the good government of this country, it is disgusting that a Bill cutting out the very heart of the legislature from its effects could make it through. Parliament does nothing to improve its public perception by seeking removing itself from public scrutiny.

I quite agree: citizens must watch the watchers if we are to keep their power over us in check. This Bill seems designed to make sure that we cannot.

China abandons blog identity plan

BBC News reports:

The Chinese government is backing down from plans to force millions of Chinese bloggers to register their real names.

There are an estimated 20 million bloggers in the country and the plans announced last year provoked huge protest from Chinese internet users.

At the time, the government said it thought the system would make bloggers more responsible for their behaviour.

But Chinese bloggers condemned the proposal as an attempt by the government to control information.

The situation in China with regards to freedom of expression is more nuanced and complex than the mainstream media would have you believe. This development seems to be a sign that the increasingly economically-focused Chinese government is beginning to recognise that information wants to flow freely in a prosperous modern society.

Angelina Jolie's semantic tattoos

The Daily Mail reports: "After attending the world premiere of her latest movie, Angelina Jolie revealed her latest set of body art - geographical map coordinates accurately detailing the countries of birth of each member of her 'rainbow family'."

Well, that's one way of performing your identity, I guess!

Kate Moss as cultural vanishing point

(I think) Sam Jacob thinks we are at once subsuming and exploring our individual identity within our cultural identity via Kate Moss:

Every culture has its centre of gravity, every era its ground zero - a vanishing point that everything disappears into and flows out of. Often it's an abstract idea like beauty, truth, valour, or honesty. And often that quality is personified in figures like John Bull or Liberty, Right now and right here, that might well be Kate Moss.

Last month saw the Kate Moss / Top Shop launch that had been anticipated in magazines as varied as Vogue & Take a Break. We've seen this kind of deal before - celebrity-designers with ghost-written collections for high street retailers, (most recently Madonna's terrible Weimar lesbian outfits for H&M). We've had high fashion designers knocking out mass-market clobber causing riots at opening time. This time it feels different - and it's a lot to do with the protagonists. Both Kate and TopShop fascinate because they scrape across the normal stratification of culture.

It's a collision of the everyday with the singularly unique, of high style with high street of individual liberty and mass consumption. They are opposites that folds in on product like a Klein Bottle, a non-orientable surface with no distinction between the "inside" and "outside" that keeps on flowing into itself. Counter culture flows into shop counter.

I find the interplay of identity contexts Sam is grappling with here quite fascinating. The concept of a governing quality for a culture at any given point in history is also attractive at first glance, but I suspect that that quality is in the eye of the perceiver. Surely there is a whole, evolving web of attributes that inform the direction and focus of a culture, and the particular one that Sam sees as primary may be secondary to another observer? An intriguing piece, nevertheless.

Googlephobia growing

Ivan Pope reports on growing Googlephobia (and that in advance of their launch of a mobile phone network that will know where you are and what your voice sounds like):

You know something is hitting the popular imagination when it makes front page news. Today the Independent, with a hint of sensationalism, has put Google on the front page. So what’s brought it to this? The Independent story starts with Eric Schmidt’s somewhat daft comment that “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’.” However, there is a lot more to it than that, as anyone who follows online news will be realising. The Techmeme news service is flooded day after day with Google stories as they make the tech weather. Here are seven recent Google stories that go into the Googleophobia mix:

1. Google want’s to tell you what to do tomorrow (see above)


2. Google buys Feedburner and knows what RSS feeds we are reading


3. Google invests in human genetics firm


4. Google buys Doubleclick to control the human sum of banner advertising


5. Google wants us to report ‘paid links‘ so they can police them


6. Google launch their ‘Web History‘ product and reveal just how much they know about you


7. Google installs ‘virtual spyware‘ on Dell computers

That personal and personalised information Google is tracking is all adding up...

Justin.tv—sousveillance personified

Jamais Cascio points us towards Justin.tv:

"Justin of Justin.tv [...] wears a live-streaming wireless camera on his hat all day, every day, recording everything he sees."

This guy is sousveillance personified! Not sure I can see hat-cam wearing catching on with the public at large, though—can you?

Identity web as mirror

Joshua Porter writes:

Over time, we’re going to learn a tremendous amount about how people interact socially with one another because we can record things on the Web. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had lately with designers that ended up like “well, we’re doing design, too, but we’re really doing a ton of psychology”. The amount of effort and design energy being focused on the social interactions of people around a service is growing.

I have often observed on this blog that networked technology is a tool that allows us to extend our innate ways of relating to one another and expressing our identity. Interesting, then, to be reminded that it can also provide us with insights about how we do these things by reflecting our behaviours back to us.

So the Identity Web could be a hologram, superstring universe and mirror all at once? Well, I guess if we could contain it within a single metaphor, it would lose its mystery!

Traffic wardens get video cameras

BBC News reports:

Traffic attendants in Salford are to become the first in the UK to record their work on video.

Some wardens in the area will start to wear head-mounted miniature cameras from later this month.

NCP, which supplies traffic wardens in the city, will use the film to resolve disputes over tickets and to prosecute motorists who assault or abuse staff.

Good grief.

Identity: personal and personalised information

If we take the subjective experience of identity as being the most practically-useful definition of identity (as readers will know I do on this blog!), then we can say the following of an individual's online projection of their identity:

The online projection of your identity is made up of information that is both personal (about you) and personalised (of interest to you).

Online identity is often equated exclusively with personal information, but that approach proves to be pretty limiting for designing personalised services in the pseudonymous and probabilistic world of the web.

Taking the broader concept of identity, conversely, we can approach the intimately related topics of personalisation and identity management within a self-consistent conceptual framework. And that should make thinking about all this stuff simpler!

Of course, a observer may not be able to tie your personalised information to you as a unique entity in any given instance: for example, Google cannot when you make an anonymous search. However, Google will be able to infer the valuable insight that you belong to a certain demographic or group identity from your search queries and the links you click in the search results (and track you as a defacto persistent individual or group identity via your IP address on your return, of course, unless you know how to hide that information from them).

Furthermore, your personalised information may be far more detailed and rich than your personal information is. After all, it includes not just the huge quantities of information we generate implicitly through our surfing and searching, but also the information we explicitly (co-)create and express—such as this information I am expressing right now, on this blog! (In codifying it into my own words, I am literally "personalising" the information that I have absorbed from others or encountered in my own imagination.)

Your personalised information is not only relevant to your own experience of your identity, then: it is also highly relevant to observers of your online presence who seek to obtain insight into your identity (and then show you just the right adverts, for example). Personalised information allows those observers to build a much more complete, albeit fuzzier, picture of your identity than they could just from your (uniquely-identifying) personal information.

And, of course, should observers be able to tie your personal and personalised information together, they gain oversight of a very complete picture of your identity indeed.

Technologies of connectivity—and alienation

Sherry Turkle is techo-disillusioned. She writes:

Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected—or more alienated.

...

We live in techno-enthusiastic times, and we are most likely to celebrate our gadgets. Certainly the advertising that sells us our devices has us working from beautiful, remote locations that signal our status. We are connected, tethered, so important that our physical presence is no longer required. There is much talk of new efficiencies; we can work from anywhere and all the time. But tethered life is complex; it is helpful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people.

Sherry offers us "five troubles that try my tethered soul" (she clearly has something of a poetic bent):

• There is a new state of the self, itself
• Are we losing the time to take our time?
• The tethered adolescent
• Virtuality and its discontents
• Split attention

Sherry's full post is well worth a read—I found it hard to find much to disagree with, although I would suggest that just because we increasingly have the opportunity to be "networked" in every moment, that doesn't mean that we cannot learn to turn down that opportunity as our soul's care requires. I'm certainly enjoying putting some boundaries around my blog reading time (strictly on the exercise bike in the morning only!).

I Am...

What a great image! Roll over the picture above to put it in context of loverfishy's other images. Then click on it, and roll over the word "fat" on the original image.

Don't you just love all that identity recontextualisation? ; )

Image courtesy of loverfishy.

The Emperor's New Identity Web

Piers Fawkes imagines:

...a possible future where we'd have to manage our identity in a way similar to the way we manage our image today. In the same way we dress and style ourselves to say something (or nothing) about ourselves, we will dress our personal information to do the same thing. Some of will don red coats to show off, some will don black coats to hide.

The basic premise behind this vision is that our privacy is dead. Our data is already out there.

I don't suggest that 2007 will see us trying to don our red coats just yet - for one thing the tools are not built to do this just yet - but I do think that the general public will have a privacy epiphany as they become aware of their lack of privacy and flow of personal data.

I engaged with Piers in the comments section of his post:

Interesting piece, Piers.

I completely agree with you that privacy, in its traditionally-understood form, is dying. [weaverluke readers will know that I have written as much on this blog.]

However, what you seem to be getting at with your (admittedly evocative) "red coat, black coat" analogy, but don't spell out, is that, as more and more information about us is available online, coats of either colour will increasingly become as invisible as the Emperor's New Clothes to those observers who choose to look through them to the "naked identity" of the wearer.

Even that metaphor breaks down when you examine it, because all we can ever see online are assertions, which we ascribe to certain people, about other things and people (or about themselves). (Of course, we cannot see people or things themselves, because they exist in the physical world!) But how do we really know who such assertions are from, and if we can trust them?

We can never really be sure what's what or who's who in the slippery world of the Identity Web (as the Kathy Sierra debacle illustrated all too well). All we can do is establish relatively strong hypotheses—and, until the sophistication of identity-mediating technologies approaches the incredible efficacy of our human cognitive perceptual mechanisms, those hypotheses will very often remain moderately confident at best.

Posted by: weaverluke | May 20, 2007 1:48:14 PM

Thanks for your great comment, Luke. In response:

We can never really be sure what's what or who's who in the slippery world of real life. Think of a time you interviewed someone for a job - you never know whether their CV was 100% true or 100% false. And I'd bet that despite your cognitive mechanisms, you'll only know slightly better by the end of the interview too.

Posted by: Piers Fawkes | May 20, 2007 8:30:52 PM

Piers,

Very true! However, if you then met and talked with that person again, your ability to verify their facial appearance, voice print and body language would allow you to be almost certain that they were the same person as you met before. This is not really the case on the web, where the cues may be hugely diverse, but the identification methods available to us are far less integrated than our biologically-evolved ones.

Conversely, it is easier to build a rich picture of *someone* (even if you are less than certain of the persistence of their underlying identity across all the constituent pieces of information than you would be having grilled them face to face!) online than offline.

Then again, if we consider our extended offline social networks as analogies for the links of the (social) web, it becomes clear that—as you say—we rely on pretty fuzzy cues for identifying the deeper characteristics of people offline too: we ask friends' opinions of other friends and so on.

My takeaway from all this—we must learn deeply about the "Human Web"—how we interact with one another and our world via our intricate and sophisticated, biologically-evolved organism—if we are to understand how to build an effective Identity Web. And privacy is a concept, of relatively recent provenance, which may prove to have relatively shallow roots in that organism.

Garlik DataPatrol report

So my first Garlik DataPatrol full report has arrived, some three weeks after I registered (this follows an initial credit report which arrived just a couple of days after registration).

The report is beautifully presented (online), and contains some really useful information—such as a view of how the credit agencies see you and a demographic analysis of your residential area. I also learned where to go to stop junk mail—the Mail Preference Service—and that I could opt out of the Electoral Roll ("just put a cross in the box on your annual Electoral Roll renewal form") and restrict access to Companies House information on me (also with the MPS), all in order to reduce my risk of suffering Identity Theft.

However, I am apparently doing a Bad Thing in putting a link to my CV on my blog, and using my real name on my blog. This is a tricky one, because the professional benefits to me of having this information openly discoverable are considerable. But it does bring home to me why many bloggers blog pseudonymously...

One aspect of DataPatrol that doesn't work well yet is the Connections section, where your supposed personal and company connections are listed. Perhaps this is partly because us bloggers put ourselves virtually around somewhat, but the results here really don't give a good picture of my important connections. I haven't even met many of the individuals listed—they simply work for a company that employs someone I do know.

The other thing that was a bit creepy was having many of the people who live on my street listed by name and address! That just brings home the perils of being on the Electoral Roll, I guess. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I want to snoop on my neighbours. Perhaps Garlik should consider omitting this category of information from their reports?

These niggles aside, I would certainly recommend my UK readers give Garlik a try—it doesn't take more than ten minutes or so to register, and you will surely gain some useful and thought-provoking insights into how your identity is represented in the public sphere.

Mobile operators poised to mediate identity management

Dave Birch writes:

[T]he position of the mobile handset as the basis of practical identity management in the real world is becoming unassailable. [...I]t passes all of the tests: it's portable, has secure storage, has its own keyboard for PIN entry and so on. But [...] it is controlled by the mobile operators, so people who want better identification and authentication to be used by "ordinary" people (ie, not nerds like me) such as governments and banks will end up having to cut a deal with them. But why wouldn't they prefer to pay the operator a penny every time you log on to your home banking if it saves them millions and millions in development costs, operating costs and fraud?

I'm sure Dave's right that our mobile will increasingly become our tool of choice for asserting our identity as we go about our lives—and that the mobile operators are in a fantastic position to take advantage of the massive new markets that will emerge around such identity management.

Exogenously unbounded identity

Kermit Snelson writes:

A few days ago, David Weinberger issued the following challenge to the readers of his new book: “Can you come up with the Everything Is Miscellaneous elevator pitch? Lord knows, I can’t.”

How about this: “To equate identity with location is an instrument of autocracy.”

A more verbose but less gnomic summary of the argument might go like this: In the physical world, everything must occupy a single location. In the realm of identity, however, different rules apply. The fact that the Mona Lisa cannot “be” in the Louvre and in the Prado simultaneously doesn’t mean that it cannot simultaneously “be” a piece of old wood, a masterpiece, and a tourist attraction. Laws of physics and laws of identity are not of the same ontological order.

I couldn't agree more. Indeed, this was one of the key points that John Madelin and I argued in our white paper of 2006: we unconsciously reproduce the 3D limitations of our physical world in the location metaphor of the the web's addressing architecture (DNS), but in so doing we distort the web's ability to mediate our exogenously unbounded, subjective perceptions of identity.

More of my thoughts on the original post as a whole are in its comments section.

Your network increases your effective intelligence

Jamais Cascio, pondering trends in outsourcing, writes:

Ironically, it's entirely possible that the carbon footprint of shipping may add so much cost to outsourced manufacturing that those jobs get re-localized, whereas the knowledge jobs (needing only an Internet connection) end up being globalized.

So are we headed to a world where the only stable jobs are those that absolutely require hands-on contact—health maintenance, grooming, and the like? Or to one where wages even out across the world of skilled workers? Neither strikes me as terribly appealing or stable.

I think Jamais' observation about the likely re-localisation of manufacturing is quite persuasive. However, I have a feeling he's a bit off target with the second paragraph. While stable jobs for all but the most worker location-dependent tasks may come under threat, my guess is that the economic well-being of the successful knowledge workers will actually only continue to follow a power-law curve, with the richest continuing to get richer.

Knowledge workers don't get hired only for what they know or what they can do, but also for who they know—and, as Clay Shirky long since pointed out, winners take all in social networking. Why do people with great networks get hired? Partly through plain old nepotism, of course, but also because who you know effectively increases both what you know and what you can do by enabling you to outsource task fulfillment across your uniquely-valuable network.

Is music the universal language?

Laura-Lee Balkwill asks of a neurologist, a psychologist and an anthropologist, in a most wonderful All in the Mind podcast (30'):

Is music the universal language?

One person's spoken language might sound like gobbledy gook to another - but when it comes to music do we beat to a common evolutionary drum? Could music be the universal language - linking minds across cultures and ancestral time? And, which came first - music or language? Don your headphones and climb aboard for an acoustic adventure. Does music lie at the heart...and brain...of what it means to be human?

An excerpt from the podcast transcript that summarises the interests of each speaker:

Laura-Lee Balkwill [interviewer]: So why is music interesting – that's a complex question with a lot of different answers depending on who you talk to.

Catherine Falk [ethnomusicologist]: Music is utterly entwined with notions of memory, of emotion, of identity, of relationship with place and time; of relationship with other human beings, with all living and inanimate objects, relations with the heavens, with the gods, people's ways of interpreting their worlds or their cosmologies in their own specific, very culturally specific ways.

Laura-Lee Balkwill [psychologist] : I find music interesting because of its power to evoke emotion, to express emotion, to make people feel. And that's how I got into studying music and emotion to begin with because I wanted to explore how that worked and whether that worked the same across cultures.

Ani Patel [neurologist]: And it presents science with opportunity to study the relationship between brain function and complex cognition, which is one of the big topics in neuroscience today: how does brain circuitry give rise to the mental experiences that we have of the world? And music is a wonderful domain to explore that because of its complexity and its reducibility, I would say.

A summary of some other points that fascinated me:

• Cathy Falk: archeological evidence of Neanderthal dwellings suggests music may pre-date language;
• Ani Patel: alternatively, we may not have evolved a capacity for making music so much as creatively adapted other cognitive mechanisms such as those responsible for language;
• Ani Patel: "modern neuro-imaging has shown us that both sides of the brain are very much involved in processing music. Language as well – but language does have a strong left hemisphere bias whereas music seems to draw on both sides of the brain – and does importantly, integrate different aspects of brain function in [...] waves of integration as opposed to simple processing chains";
• Laura-Lee Balkwill: Some aspects of music, such as certain fundamental characteristics' evocation of particular emotional responses, seem to be universal;
• Patel & Falk: whereas many others are culturally-specific;
• Ani Patel: "Some very deep and evolutionarily ancient reward centres of the brain [are] activated by [...] music. And these are areas that are typically activated by biologically significant behaviour such as eating, or reproducing or so on, and yet they [are] activated by this abstract acoustic stimulus with no obvious survival value";
• Cathy Falk: "Music is not an universal language any more than language itself is an universal language. I don't understand Swahili; it is a language. People construct the syntax of music very much in tandem with the way they construct themselves socially in their own very culturally specific ways."

I very much recommend listening to the podcast itself, which is interspersed with some great audio illustrations of diverse musics.

Music taps into our richest, deepest selves: our emotions, our language skills, our imagination, our universal humanity and the culturally-contextualised aspects of our identity. To understand music (and, in many ways, we are only just beginning to) really would be to go a long way to understanding what it is to be human.

Widgets and identity

The Chinwag event last night on "Media Widgetized"* was well attended by people from startups and big technology brands alike. The panel all had interesting and informed things to say, and Steve Bowbrick was a funny and effective Chair. Two good writeups of the content of the debate are here and