Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook are often easy ways to make fairly uncommitted identity claims and statements. Fred Stutzman is writing a PhD on the subject and has studied identity in facebook. He’s found members often use multiple identities, which may be of interest to the many employers who now use these sites to try to authenticate claims made by job applicants on CVs. Stutzman’s presentation is on Google video.
Second Life is an ingeneous experiment in on-line identity. After 3 years of running its founder has now introduced a class system. Members can be Trusted, Untrusted, Verified and Unverified. This is loosely based on the ability or willingness to pay, just like in real life.
Bill Thomson reminds us that identity has been a long term philosophical problem and it may be just as well that it is ambiguous and we can continually update or contest identities. You can hear his talk on the subject here.
The possibility of a totally transparent identity on the net where anyone could access any detail about you would be a chilling prospect to most people. David Lyon suggests that this type of total surveillance ultimately exhausts people of their identity. Yet few would wish the reverse of total anonymity either. Most wish for some control over the representation of their identity, but also respect the judgment of others. The world we experience would be a lonely place if our identities were the sole responsibility of ourselves.
One distinction between traditional society and modernity may be in how identity is granted and acquired. Traditionally identity is tied to the body, physical presence and appearance, and may be based on class, caste, tribal or occupational stratefications, which were also deliniated geographically and temporally. Modern society is assumed to have diluted these constraints, and postmodernism and the network society is regarded to have abandoned them entirely. Identity representation may be thought to exist somewhere along a dimension of traditional, given and compulsory, to postmodern, elective and voluntary. Accordingly, nowadays the representation of identity is much more the responsibility of the person, and the body is a fluid or plastic category which may be virtualized or reconfigured according to need. The most radical examples of this are to be found in social network sites. Yet as David Lyon and others have suggested, biometrics, ubiquitous or pervasive computing, and many forms of digital surveillance, bring the body and categories of time and space right back into the identity equation, but in this case in the traditionally compulsory way.
