Lifetracing 4. Identity 2.0

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¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 In Web 2.0 both identity announcement and identity placement are mediated, performed and constructed by cultural software in the form of social networking sites and search engines. Although everything nowadays seems to be labeled 2.0 — Government 2.0, Education 2.0, Travel 2.0, Library 2.0, Learning 2.0, Broadcast 2.0, Camping 2.0 — it can be used as a label to describe how things change within a Web 2.0 environment with the web as a platform (O’Reilly 2005). boyd (2008) describes Web 2.0 as “Yet-another-buzzword … means different things to different people”:

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 For the technology crowd, Web 2.0 was about a shift in development and deployment. [...] For the business crowd, Web 2.0 can be understood as hope. […] For users, Web 2.0 was all about reorganizing web-based practices around Friends.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 In this chapter, Web 2.0 is used as a periodization, to indicate the period after the dot-com bubble. Identity 2.0 is not about ‘porting’ an identity online [7] onto the social web, it is rather seen as a break from online identity pre-Web 2.0. This section deals with the main features of Identity 2.0 as formed by the entanglement of search engines with social media platforms. The main characteristics of Identity 2.0 can be summed up as follows: it is in a perpetual beta, networked, part of a participatory culture with user-generated content, distributed, indexed by search engines and persistent. The sub-sections discussing these characteristics will show the impact of the search engines on identity performance online on a cultural level (user behavior), political level (privacy and control) and phenomenological level (distributed social media landscapes).

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 4.1 Beta-Identity

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 The two-point-o in identity 2.0 refers to to the current web era, Web 2.0, the social web [8] with its beta software and update fetish. In the perpetual beta “in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis” (O’Reilly 2005) new features are added which may add new fields to the profile page that need to be filled out. It seems nearly impossible to complete your profile as the database always wants more information. “Your profile is 85% complete” is a common sight when logging into a web service. The database is hungry and never seems to be fed enough.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0
Illustration 10: Incomplete profiles.

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Google recently joined the profile hunger with the release of their new product titled Google Me (April 2009). Google Me is a personal profile page which may be returned in Google’s search engine results when people search for your name. It demands a certain amount of information of the user for the user to be eligible to be featured in the search results. If you do not provide enough information you will receive the following notification: “Your profile is not yet eligible to be featured in Google search results. To have your profile featured, add more information about yourself” (Google Profile 2009). Adding your name, website, location, personal pictures and a one line biography is simply not enough (see illustration 11).

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Illustration 11: Ineligible Google Me profile.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 The threshold for the amount of information needed in order to be eligible is unknown and there is no indicator showing how much more information is needed. Google simply states that “Adding more information will help you improve your profile’s rank” (Google Profile 2009) — the more the better. Google’s PageRank algorithm for ranking websites has always been determined by a combination of various factors, including the number of inlinks (references) to a certain webpage. The ranking of your ‘official’ Google web profile is determined by the amount of information you supply which “offers [users] control over their search appearance only in as much as they are willing to give Google more information about themselves” (Kirkpatrick 2009). A sense of control is offered by giving away your personal information. This sense of control is important because search engines play a major role in identity construction online.

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 4.2 Networked Identity

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 The web self is no longer present on one single website, such as the personal homepage, nor is it present on just one single social networking site:

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 It is common for adults to have a profile on more than one site — on average each adult with a social networking page or profile has profiles on 1.6 sites, and 39% of adults have profiles on two or more sites. (Ofcom 2008: 5)

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Each social networking site serves a different purpose and has different user demographics. Social network migration is common because you are there, where your friends are. Many social applications allow integration into other platforms and applications through the embedding of content or distributing of content or activity through APIs [9]. For example, when I take a picture with my mobile phone and upload it to the web using the Mobypicture [10] service it automatically notifies Twitter that a new picture has been posted with a link to it. Mobypicture can be configured to cross-post the picture to other platforms, such as a blog, a social networking profile, or a Flickr account. User-generated content is dispersed across the network and there is a reconfiguration of the user. Although lifestreaming is all about user activity it is much less about the user than it is about the applications and platforms exchanging and distributing user data. When visualizing the network of data flows of social services, the lifestream is more service-centered than user-centered (see illustration 12).

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Illustration 12: Personal social media landscape. Social media map from user Anne Helmond. May 2009.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 See Illustration 18 on the Conclusion page for key to symbols.

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 The various types of services within the personal media landscape are shown in illustration 13. There is a clear grouping of services each of which focuses on a particular type of content. Google and Twitter are found in the center of the social media flower. Google acts as a centralizing force within the media landscape indexing most of the content, links or social media behavior generated within the services. Twitter is also located in the center because it acts as a central social node in this particular social media landscape. Illustration 13 maps the data flows between the services and shows how services communicate reciprocally using RSS, APIs and embed codes. It shows how certain nodes in the network act as hubs, for example, Twitter, WordPress and Google. These maps were constructed with two user name check services that allow you to check for a particular user name across a large number of social media websites.[11] These services can be used to check for the availability of a user name on a particular website but they can also be used to check the presence of a user across the social media landscape.

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0
Illustration 13: Data flows within personal social media landscape.

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 4.3 User-Generated Identity

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 Identity is not only constructed or performed by the users themselves; some aspects are determined by others. In the case of social media, user-generated content plays an important role in the identity construction by others. As there are low barriers to publishing content, users and others can easily upload pictures, videos and text about the user. Many platforms also provide feedback possibilities such as commenting or tagging. On the photo sharing site Flickr users can leave comments, place notes and add tags to pictures. Privacy levels can be adjusted but the recommended default settings are such that your known Flickr contacts can add notes and tags while your Flickr users can only comment on pictures. Why is the question of tagging so poignant when thinking about identity in the era of user-generated content?

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 In 2008 Facebook users uploaded over 10 billion photos to the social networking site, arguably making it the largest photo-sharing site to date (McCarthy 2008) compared with Photobucket with 7.4 billion images (2009) and Flickr which hit the 2 billion images mark in 2007. Photobucket, which was the most popular photo-sharing service before Facebook, is now losing its popularity to Flickr and Google’s Picasa. Facebook and Photobucket (tightly integrated into MySpace) mainly rely on traffic from social networking sites while Flickr (owned by Yahoo!) and Google mainly rely on traffic from search engines and e-mail (McCarthy 2008). If we consider the idea that identity construction online is largely performed by the engines then tagging is a key item. Tagging is a common description mechanism for user-generated content and tags are used for indexing content by search engines and are often used for retrieval. This may lead to user practices of consciously tagging oneself in pictures you look good in and refraining from tagging pictures you do not look good in, in order to prevent being associated with that particular image. There is a distinction between providing descriptions and tags for your own content and for other people’s content. The latter is sometimes referred to as External Meta Data which is described by Loren Baker as “Users who bookmark sites tag them with keywords and descriptions which add an honest and unbiased definition which is created by the public and not the owner of the site” (2009). However, if the service is set to allow anyone to tag your content the idea of “an honest and unbiased definition” is quite naive. Tagging can also be used as a strategy to destroy a public image which was the case of a journalist who was tagged with “grey, useless, dirty, old, vain and weird haircut.”

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 4.4 Distributed Identity

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 Identity performance is distributed across the web and performed using various social media such as social networking sites, blog platforms and photo and video sharing sites. If your photos are stored with one service, your videos with another service and your bookmarks with yet another service, the idea of data and identity management becomes very important. There is a need for a centralizing force within the distributed network: a central identity hub. Several services try to aggregate and facilitate the exchange of our distributed online presence. They point to all the platforms and services where identity is performed by the user. An example of such a service is My Name is E.

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0
Illustration 14: My Name is E.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 4.5 Indexed Identity

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 The web is faced with the contradiction of fleeting content versus indexed content in which nothing is forgotten and everything is remembered:

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 The Web, resembling one vast, rapidly fluctuating archive is, unlike a traditional archive, being rebuilt every minute. Its sites can disappear within days, hours or seconds. Web content is revised and updated, often leaving no record of the previous alterations. Viewing the Web on the one hand as an archival medium and ephemeral medium on the other, the two notions seem to challenge each other. (Weltevrede 2009: 47)

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 On the one hand, we deal with the ephemerality of content since identity construction through search engines is always based on the latest version of the search engine index. This requires continuous updating of the distributed identity. So if you change jobs, you should update your Twitter biography, LinkedIn profile, Facebook profile and about page on your blog. On the other hand, with the indexing fixation of the search engines and the increasing cooperation of services allowing their user data to be indexed, it becomes nearly impossible not to have traces of your identity performance indexed by search engines. We are actively constructing an identity for the search engines in order to have a sense of control over the outcome. Not only our user-generated content and profiles are indexed but also our actions within networks performed on social objects:

• ¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0
• silvertje has started 0 topics. silvertje has made 1 reply. … silvertje replied on May 13, 2009 06:25 to the question “We want all …”
• Anteek added a contact: Anne Helmond. MyBlogLog Action submitted by Anteek -
• Uploads from Anne Helmond, tagged… – http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvertje/tags/amsterdam/
• Qik | Anne Helmond | Untitled. Streamed by Anne Helmond. More at http://qik.com/silvertje.

¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 0 The indexing fetish of the engines has expanded to social actions as well, adding new identity performance traces to its index which may become persistent.

¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 4.6 Persistent Identity

¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 0 Due to the large number of engines indexing your digital traces and services exchanging and distributing your data through APIs, embed codes, and RSS feeds it is nearly impossible to remove your digital traces. Persistent identity transforms our relations with others:

¶ 33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0 It is said that true friendships last forever, however, in the case of online social networking this sentiment gets a completely different meaning. The digital trails of an online friendship — true or not — really do last forever, since they are stored indefinitely on servers. Moreover, the documentation of friendships becomes easily accessible because of the digital, portable nature of the information. (Albrechtslund 2008)

¶ 34 Leave a comment on paragraph 34 0 Because of the persistence of the search engine index data it is very likely that your profile will outlive you. What happens to your profile when you are gone? Etoy, Mediamatic and Pips:lab are three (art) institutions that have addressed this question by offering a service allowing you to preserve and control your data after you have passed away.

¶ 35 Leave a comment on paragraph 35 0 4.6.1 DieSpace

¶ 36 Leave a comment on paragraph 36 0 DieSpace is an interactive, multimedia, theatre performance by pips:lab which addresses the question of “online” life after “offline” death. Visitors can create their profiles during the show using the pips:lab Lumasol light writing technique to fill the DieSpace database with information. DieSpace is “the first interactive internet community for people who have passed away” (pips:lab) and it allows you to record a message for those you leave behind. DieSpace allows you to upload your soul to the conceptual social networking community for the dead.

¶ 37 Leave a comment on paragraph 37 0
Illustration 15: Visitors write their answers to the DieSpace profile questions using the Lumasol technique.

¶ 38 Leave a comment on paragraph 38 0 4.6.2 Mission Eternity

¶ 39 Leave a comment on paragraph 39 0 Mission Eternity is a similar art project by Etoy. It allows people to create a digital self-containing capsule with their digital remains. Each capsule has a unique 16 character alphanumeric code to identify each pilot and the deceased’s data, and can be used to search for traces in search engines. Mission Eternity is about memory in an era in which people are paranoid about losing data. Etoy aims to host the capsules eternally and is developing open source software allowing the capsules to rebuild themselves because code and software also have an expiration date.

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Illustration 16: The remains of Mission Eternity pilot Timothy Leary, shown at a Etoy lecture.

¶ 41 Leave a comment on paragraph 41 0 4.6.3 IkRip

¶ 42 Leave a comment on paragraph 42 0 IkRip, part of the Mediamatic series about death and self-representation on the internet, is an initiative addressing the question of what will happen with your online profiles and online data after you have passed away. It allows you to control what will happen with your online self after your offline self has passed away. This question is becoming increasingly relevant in an age in which one grows up online and in which it is difficult, if not impossible, not to leave any traces online before one passes away. IkRip was initiated to address the issue of a lack of a clear policy on most social networking sites after the death of a user:

¶ 43 Leave a comment on paragraph 43 0 Facebook is one of the social networking sites that has included a statement on death in their Terms of Use: ‘When we are notified that a user has died, we will generally, but are not obligated to, keep the user’s account active under a special memorialized status for a period of time determined by us to allow other users to post and view comments.’ The Dutch dance-community Partyflock allows members to post condolences to the profile of deceased friends. Their profiles remain on a special section of the site, with a notification of their death. Livejournal has a similar group for deceased members, but it is created by a member, not by Livejournal itself. (Baudoin, 2009)

¶ 44 Leave a comment on paragraph 44 0 IkRip allows you to create your own license after answering a series of questions about what should happen to your profiles and data online (see illustration 17). This may be seen as the online equivalent of a will or testament, “a legal document declaring a person’s wishes regarding the disposal of their property when they die” (WordNet). Personal property in the form of images, videos, music, text is also located and stored online. These properties are often hosted with third parties that do not have clear policies about user content after the user has passed away.

¶ 45 Leave a comment on paragraph 45 0
Illustration 17: IkRIP profile page

¶ 46 Leave a comment on paragraph 46 0 Footnotes

¶ 47 Leave a comment on paragraph 47 0 [7] The field of virtual ethnography looks at identity online as a continuation of the offline identity and Miller and Slater state “we need to treat internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces.” (2000: 5)

¶ 48 Leave a comment on paragraph 48 0 [8] The World Wide Web has always been social in the sense that it linked people together but social web refers to the web as constructed by social software/social media: “In tech circles, social media has replaced the earlier fave ‘social software.’” (boyd, 2009). Social media is not something new because “[...] some of the first applications were framed around communication and sharing. For decades, we’ve watched the development of new genres of social media — MUDs/MOOs, instant messaging, chatrooms, bulletin boards, etc.” (boyd, 2009) However, what has significantly changed is role of the users and producers with the increasing popularity of social media since the rise of Friendster in 2003 and the dominance of search engines as our entry point to the web. (from unpublished PhD proposal)

¶ 49 Leave a comment on paragraph 49 0 [9] “API, or Application Programming Interface, is a code that allows other computer programs to access services offered by an application.” (Manovich, 2008: 9)

¶ 50 Leave a comment on paragraph 50 0 [10] Mobypicture is a service that allows you to directly share your pictures with all your friends on all popular social sites: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, Vimeo, and more! http://www.mobypicture.com.

¶ 51 Leave a comment on paragraph 51 0 [11] Sources used: KnowEm UserName Check — Thwart Social Media Identity Theft: http://knowem.com/ Namechk — Check Username Availability at Multiple Social Networking Sites: http://namechk.com.

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