Lifetracing 5. Conclusion & References

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2 Conclusion

3 The Traces of a Networked Life has made an analysis of online identity within the symbiotic relationship between users, search engines and social software platforms. It analyses how online identity is constructed by software-engine relations, and how identity formation is subject to software-engine politics.

4 Through an historical analysis of self-presentation platforms — the homepage, blog, social networking profile, and lifestream — I have concluded that there has been a significant shift from the ‘centralized’ identity of the homepage to the ‘distributed identity of the lifestream, which both aggregates data from multiple platforms and organizes the online life into a continuous data stream. I have called this Identity 2.0 — an identity always under construction, never finished, networked, user-generated, distributed and persistent.

5 Acknowledgments

6 I would like to thank the Networked Committee, the Networked Partners and Turbulence.org (in particular Jo Green and Helen Thorington) for allowing me to continue my research. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) for their inspiration, Geert Lovink, Sabine Niederer and Margreet Riphagen from the Institute of Network Cultures for their support and Virtueel Platform for their thought provoking events. Esther Weltevrede for providing insightful commentary and Anneke Agema for her help.

7 References

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9 Anne Helmond – Google Profile. Google Profile. Available at: http://www.google.com/profiles/anne.helmond#about [Accessed April 24, 2009].

10 Baker, L., 2009. ‘Microsoft Yahoo Meetings Signal Start of Intelligent Acquisition or Merger, Search Engine Journal. Available at: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/microsoft-yahoomerger/9829/ [Accessed May 20, 2009].

11 Battelle, J., 2003. ‘The Database of Intentions. John Battelle’s Searchblog’, Available at: http://battellemedia.com/archives/000063.php [Accessed June 3, 2009].

12 Baudoin, T., ‘How to Deal with Death Online’, Mediamatic. Available at: http://www.mediamatic.net/page/48756/en [Accessed May 22, 2009].

13 Baym, N., 2007. ‘The Widgetized Self’, Online Fandom. Available at: http://www.onlinefandom.com/archives/the-widgetized-self/ [Accessed May 23, 2009].

14 Blain, T., ‘Lifestream vs. Socialstream: A Battle of Nomenclature’, Lifestream Blog. Available at: http://lifestreamblog.com/lifestream-vs-socialstream-a-battle-of-nomenclature/ [Accessed May 25, 2009].

15 Bowman, Jessica. ‘Search Engine Reputation Management: Setting & Managing Expectations.’ Search Engine Land 30 Jan 2008. 30 Jun 2009, Available at: http://searchengineland.com/search-engine-reputation-management-setting-managing-expectations-13252.

16 boyd, d. & Heer, J., 2006. ‘Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster’, Available at: http://www.danah.org/papers/HICSS2006.pdf [Accessed May 3, 2009].

17 boyd, d. 2008. ‘Understanding Socio-Technical Phenomena in a Web2.0 Era’, MSR New England Lab Opening, Cambridge MA, September 22. Available at: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/MSR-NE-2008.html [Accessed May 12, 2009].

18 Butler, J., 1990. Gender trouble, New York: Routledge.

19 Chandler, D., 1998. ‘Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web’, Available at: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/webident.html [Accessed April 12, 2009].

20 Cheng, J., 2007. ‘Google search by employer not illegal, say judges’, Ars Technica. Available at: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/05/google-search-by-employer-not-illegalsay-judges.ars [Accessed May 31, 2009].

21 Consalvo, M. & Paasonen, S., 2002. Women & Everyday Uses of the Internet: Agency & Identity, New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

22 Delaney, K.J., 2007. ‘You’re a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well’, Wall Street Journal. 31 Available at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117856222924394753.html [Accessed May 9, 2009].

23 Deiters, E., 2009. ‘Ontgoogle jezelf’, DePers.nl. Available at: http://www.depers.nl/economie/304337/Ontgoogle-jezelf.html [Accessed May 29, 2009].

24 Digital Methods Initiative, 2008. ‘Space for People: Suggested Fields’, Available at: http://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/SpaceForPeople [Accessed April 11, 2009].

25 Dodge, D., 2007. ‘Search engines are the Start page for the Internet’, Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing. Available at: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/12/searchengines.html [Accessed April 25, 2009].

26 Carr, N., 2007. ‘The self-recording craze is nothing new – but now we do it digitally’, The Guardian. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jun/07/comment.newmedia [Accessed April 26, 2009].

27 Fertig S., E. Freeman and D. Gelernter. 1996. ‘Lifestreams: An Alternative to the Desktop Metaphor.’ Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vancouver, 13-18 April 1996. New York: ACM, 1996. 410-11.

28 Google, 2009. ‘Google Flu Trends | How does this work?’ Available at: http://www.google.org/about/flutrends/how.html [Accessed June 3, 2009].

29 Helmond, A., 2007. ‘The Perceived Freshness Fetish’, Unpublished manuscript. University of Amsterdam, 2007. Available at: http://www.annehelmond.nl/2007/06/22/essay-theperceived-freshness-fetish/ [Accessed May 3, 2009].

30 Helmond, A., 2008. ‘Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine MA thesis, University of Amsterdam. Available at: http://www.annehelmond.nl/2008/09/23/blogging-for-engines-blogs-under-the-influenceof-software-engine-relations/ [Accessed April 19, 2009].

31 Identity. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Available at: http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/identity [Accessed April 11, 2009].

32 Kelly, K., 2007. The Technium: Lifelogging, An Inevitability. The Technium. Available at: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/02/lifelogging_an.php [Accessed June 26, 2009].

33 Krums, J., 2009. ‘http://twitpic.com/135xa – There’s a plane in the Hudson’, Available at: http://twitter.com/jkrums/status/1121915133 [Accessed April 26, 2009].

34 Kirkpatrick, M., 2009. ‘Now You Can Change What Google Says About You’, ReadWriteWeb. Available at: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/now_you_can_change_what_google_says_about_you.php [Accessed April 24, 2009].

35 Kricfalusi, E., 2009. ‘Tech for Luddites: Using the New Facebook Home Page Pt. 1′, Tech for Luddites. Available at: http://www.techforluddites.com/2009/03/using-the-new-facebookhome-page-pt-1.html [Accessed May 3, 2009].

36 Lovink, G., 2008. ‘The society of the query and the Googlization of our lives. A tribute to Joseph Weizenbaum’, Eurozine. Available at: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-09-05-lovinken.html [Accessed April 17, 2009].

37 Mann, S., 2004. ‘Sousveillance: inverse surveillance in multimedia imaging’, In Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia. New York, NY, USA: ACM, pp. 620-627. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1027673 [Accessed June 1, 2009].

38 McCarthy, C., 2008. “Facebook hosts 10 billion photos”. The Social – CNET News. Available at: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10066650-36.html [Accessed May 20, 2009].

39 Mejias, U. 2007. Networked Proximity: ICTs and the Mediation of Nearness. Unpublished dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY.

40 Miller, D. & Slater, D., 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

41 Miller, C.C., 2009. “Putting Twitter’s World to Use”. The New York Times. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/technology/internet/14twitter.html?_r=1 [Accessed April 21, 2009].

42 Nokia, 2009. ‘Nokia – Search: Lifeblog’, Available at: http://www.nokia.com/search4/index.jsp?GO.x=0&GO.y=0&GO=GO&wsid=101&charset=ISO-8859-1&qt=lifeblog [Accessed April 26, 2009].

43 Ofcom, 2008. ‘Social Networking. A quantitative and qualitative research report into attitudes, behaviours and use’, Available at: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/advice/media_literacy/medlitpub/medlitpubrss/socialnetworking/ [Accessed April 13, 2009].

44 O’Reilly, T., 2005. ‘What Is Web 2.0′, O’Reilly Media. Available at: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=4 [Accessed April 12, 2009].

45 pips:lab, 2008. ‘Diespace’. Available at: http://www.diespace.nl/ [Accessed May 22, 2009].

46 Poster, M., 1990. The Mode of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

47 Rogers, R. 2008. ‘The Politics of Web Space’, Unpublished manuscript. Available at: http://govcom.org/publications/full_list/rogers_politics_web_space_2008_pre.pdf [Accessed May 12, 2009].

48 Rose, F., 2007. ‘The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You’, Wired Magazine, (16.02). Available at: http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/ff_secretlife_1602 [Accessed May 28, 2009].

49 Search Engine Reputation Management. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_reputation_management [Accessed May 11,2009].

50 Storytlr, storytlr | your life online. Available at: http://storytlr.com/ [Accessed May 13, 2009].

51 TwitterAnalyzer / Twitter Analytic stats for silvertje. Available at: http://twitteranalyzer.com/mainStatistics.aspx?userId=silvertje&mt=u&tt=d# [Accessed April 8, 2009].

52 van Dijck, J. (2009). ‘Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content’. Media Culture Society 31(1):41-58.

53 Vaz, P. & Bruno, F., ‘Types of Self-Surveillance: from abnormality to individuals ‘at risk’’, Surveillance & Society, 1(3), 272-291.

54 Walker Rettberg, J., 2009. ‘Writing with a little help from your friends’, jill/txt. Available at: http://jilltxt.net/?p=2393 [Accessed May 26, 2009].

55 Weltevrede, E., 2009. Thinking Nationally with the Web. A Medium-specific Approach to the National Turn in Web Archiving. MA thesis. University of Amsterdam.

56 ‘WordNet Search – 3.0.’ 30 Jun 2009 http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=will.

57 Illustrations references

58 Illustration 1: Blog sidebars with widgets. Compilation from various blogs.
Illustration 2: Various lifestreaming personal webpages.
Illustration 3: Google Me Business Card by Ji Lee. Available at: http://pleaseenjoy.com/project.php?cat=4&subcat=&pid=112 [Accessed May 25, 2009].
Illustration 4: Nina Brink Google results. Search query for “Nina Brink” on Google.nl Nr 2. “Nina Brink is ook een liefdevolle moeder” (Dutch) translates to “Nina Brink is also a loving mother.” Available at: http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&client=firefoxa&
rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=M9d&q=%22nina+brink%22&btnG=Zoeken&meta= [Accessed May 29, 2009].
Illustration 5: Customizing Google/Hyves results.
Illustration 6: Nokia lifelogging software automatically tracks and stores all your text messages, photos, audio etc on your on your phone and displays it in a timeline.
Illustration 7: your.flowingdata: Collect Data About Yourself via Twitter © flowingdata.com.V
Available at: http://flowingdata.com/2009/03/10/yourflowingdata-collect-data-aboutyourself-via-twitter/ [Accessed May 25, 2009].
Illustration 8: Showing off statistics. Compilation from various social media websites.
Illustration 9: Publicity Plant website by Sander Veenhof. http://sndrv.nl/publicityplant/ [Accessed April 21, 2009].
Illustration 10: Incomplete profiles on various social media websites, including LinkedIn, BlipFM and SlideShare.
Illustration 11: Ineligible Google Me profile – Anne Helmond – Google Profile. Google Profile.
Available at: http://www.google.com/profiles/anne.helmond#about [Accessed April 24, 2009].
Illustration 12: Personal social media landscape. Social media map from user Anne Helmond. May 2009. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvertje/3582813518/ [Accessed May 31, 2009].
Illustration 13: Data flows within personal social media landscape. May 2009. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvertje/3582297307/ [Accessed May 31, 2009].
Illustration 14: My Name is E. Available at: http://www.mynameise.com/ [Accessed April 27,2009].
Illustration 15: Visitors write their answers to the DieSpace profile questions using the Lumasol technique at the New Cultural Networks – You Google My Second Space conference, Amsterdam, November 2, 2007.
Illustration 16: The remains of Mission Eternity pilot Timothy Leary, shown at the Etoy lecture at Mediamatic, Amsterdam, March 12, 2009. This container (with the 16 digits code) will be placed in the Mission Eternity sarcophagus.
Illustration 17: IkRIP profile page. Available at: http://www.ikrip.nl/ [Accessed April 17, 2009].

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