Mike English's blog

Maybe we’re not quite addicted to computer mediated communication, but we’re certainly becoming increasingly dependent on it. Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, The Big Switch, and the forthcoming book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, argues that:

The problem with the addiction metaphor … is that it presents the normal as abnormal and hence makes it easy for us to distance ourselves from our own behavior and its consequences. By dismissing talk of “Internet addiction” as rhetorical overkill, which it is, we also avoid undertaking an honest examination of how deeply our media devices have been woven into our lives and how they are shaping those lives in far-reaching ways, for better and for worse. In the course of just a decade, we have become profoundly dependent on a new and increasingly pervasive technology.

Too often today, concerns about the implications of technology are dismissed because of the over-anxious language used by under-informed news media crying wolf to cash in on the zeitgeist. What are we doing to ensure that the voices of well-informed scholars and experts are not lost in the cacophony caused by the democratization of media? For example, how do we engage the public in civil discourse about issues like privacy, identity, and the changing face of media consumption before their attention becomes over-saturated by base sensationalism?

As Joseph, David, and Chris were all traveling this week, TheSocialWeb.tv posted video from Le Web as this week’s episode.

Dave Morin does an excellent job highlighting the value of Facebook‘s social graph data. – Real names, real friends, etc. as I pointed out the other day.

But I also think Michael Arrington raises an interesting point when he says that Facebook is not actually interested in being open. He goes on to say that “open” doesn’t always win, but is actually what the weaker competitors do when they band together to compete. I agree that it may not be in Facebook’s best interest to adopt the standards of the open stack at this point, but is openness really a sign of weakness? Or could it be rather a sign of strength when a social network adopts an open attitude – a sign of confidence in their network, and the commitment of their users to the community that their network provides? Is Facebook worried that being more “open” will degrade the value of the social graph data they’ve hoarded? Are things like Friend Connect, MySpaceID, and OpenSocial enough to force Facebook to adopt standards like OpenID and OAuth?

Much as I generally dislike the MySpace community, I’m really excited by Max Engel‘s enthusiasm about the open stack. If MySpace continues with its commitment to “open” ideas, a lot of users stand to benefit.

The biggest problem for “open” as I see it, is not having a place to control your identity that is both independent and centralized. A lot of sites are implementing bits and pieces of the open stack, but as far as I’ve seen, only a few of the large existing networks are trying to implement the whole thing. If I’m going to connect the dots between my accounts across the web and tie them all to one source for my profile information, I don’t want that source to be under someone else’s control. I don’t want my Facebook profile to be the definitive ‘me’ on the web, and I definitely don’t want it to be my MySpace page. I’m glad that we’re starting to have more freedom to choose, with a growing list of OpenID providers and all, but I still don’t see a comprehensive solution that works for me. I want complete independent and centralized control of my identity.

Online, our identity is a composite representation of who we are. If we google our names or screen names, we are presented with a wealth of publicly available information about ourselves.  The tracks we leave online are indelible, so the quantity of this information will only grow as we continue to interact with various web services. What do all these bits and pieces of data say about us?

Google‘s great success was in pinpointing the value of organizing information. Organization, especially providing context, adds a great deal of value to information. (The data is out there already, and if it isn’t, it will be soon. The trick is in finding it, and making sense of it.) In a similar way, we need to provide value-added information about ourselves; we need to look at what’s out there and organize it for people in a way that makes sense. In doing so, we become the recognized as the rightful authority about our identity online.

If we want to have any sense of identity online, we need to put all of the data about us in context. If we don’t provide this context and tell the world who we are, we risk being a lost statistic,  being defined by someone else, or only being partially defined by any random cross section of data coming up in a search which could skew perspectives of who we are or what we’re about. This is where having control of our data is important, because it’s essential that we become the primary source for information about ourselves. How do we do that?

This is where things get a little strange. The democratization of information on the web creates quite a bit of noise. Somehow, we have to make ourselves heard above all the noise. We need to find ways to connect with the right people. (The right people are the ones with which we stand to form meaningful relationships.) We need to set ourselves apart from the crowd and highlight what makes us unique, interesting, and worth someone’s attention. Making the most of what the Internet can offer becomes then, a sort of fame-game, where all the players are minor celebrities doing their best to manage their image while still being authentic. A variety of techniques for doing this have been suggested; Chris Brogan for example, offers a Free eBook on Personal Branding. I think Hugh Macleod sums it up best when he writes about the Global Microbrand as the “ticket off the treadmill.” But I would go further; the personal microbrand strategy doesn’t need to have a commercial payoff (book deal, speaking gigs, etc.) to be of value to bloggers. Having any degree of name recognition raises your chances of connecting with the right people. Visibility adds value.

Is it an egotistical excercise to think of identity in this way? Maybe it can be. But, at the same time, I think it’s a realistic first step if your goal is to maximize your chances of building meaningful relationships online.

(Here come the questions…)

What are the essential elements of a profile page?

• your name
• your contact information
• a picture or avatar
• some kind of bio, or a few self-descriptive words
• what else?

What contact information should be included on a profile page?

• e-mail
• twitter
• instant messaging
• phone?

Eventually these questions become more about privacy than accessibility.

But what does privacy mean on the open web?

With the advent of social networking websites, and especially since the increased popularity of Facebook and Twitter we’ve grown accustomed to living publicly. We no longer think twice about updating Twitter or our Facebook status to let the entire world know where we are, or what we’re doing. Why?

Part of this has to do, I think, with knowing that this information is of interest to our own existing social groups. It’s nice to know what your friends are up to. On the other hand, are we at greater risk by exposing this information? By using services like brightkite or Dopplr are we simply asking to be kidnapped, or to have our houses looted in our absence?

In my personal experience, doubts about these new web-ventures have usually been dismissed as old-fashioned and out of place. There’s a new paradigm, we’re working toward a new reality, and these old fears need to be set aside on the frontier of innovation.

The new reality, as I see it, is one where technology works for people.  The new social web is one where our virtual interactions begin to mimic the subtleties of ‘real life‘ social interaction. But there are a lot of difficulties in manifesting this vision. At the forefront is the problem of privacy. In real life you don’t go to great lengths to hide information about yourself, but you don’t rattle off everything you’ve ever done the first second you meet someone either. In real life we get to know people gradually; we become acquainted with them over time and more intimate channels of communication may or may not be opened.

If you strike up a conversation with someone in a coffeehouse for example, you don’t give them your home phone, mobile phone, mailing address, weekly schedule, favorite books, favorite movies, and who knows what else in the first five minutes of conversation, and before you get to know them as a person. But this is how it works on the web right now, it’s usually all or nothing, because we treat profiles like business cards. Not that this isn’t useful, but for the average user, it becomes difficult to decide what information to share.

The other thing about real life information sharing is that it is almost always managed subconsiously on an individual basis. We think about our relationship with each person we interact with, and they often don’t fall into clear-cut categories. The categorical model of relationships assumption that most social websites with privacy controls make is inadequate.

Mimicking the safety of this individual and gradual sharing of information is difficult on the web. On the web, we like everything to be automatic and ready to go. We don’t want to spend our time managing our information, we want to spend it actually being social. It’s easier to build in levels of privacy to a closed, centralized network like Facebook. But on the open web, lack of universal standards makes managing privacy a dauntingly time-consuming task. Is it worth the effort? How badly do we need our privacy? How do we think about privacy on the open web? Are our models analogous to real world social interaction? Can they be?

EDIT:

Chris Saad points out that “traditional ideas of privacy are changing.” Are these changes a natural evolution, or are they sparked by the inability of the Internet’s global interconnectedness, the “global village” model, to mimic traditional social relations?  If the later, and if we treat this effect of technology on our lives as acceptable, the Internet potentially stands to have a larger cultural impact than I think anyone yet expects.

What does identity mean online?

In the past, the most important moniker for online identity was your e-mail address. This is changing.  Identity is increasingly being defined not by e-mail address, but by URL. It doesn’t matter anymore where your mailbox is, but what property you actually inhabit on the web.

If you can prove you control a URL, then you have an identity you can use across the web. OpenID is the new definitive standard for exactly this. It’s a sort of handshake for verifying ownership of these online properties.

If you hadn’t already noticed, this blog is OpenID enabled. That means that anyone with an OpenID can easily leave a comment, automatically including whatever identifying information they’ve set their provider to pass along. It also means that I can use this blog as an OpenID. When the Internet asks, “Who are you?” I can respond, “I’m http://mikeenglish.net/blog/, nice to make your acquaintance.” – only, is that best representation of who I am?

A URL provides two forms of information, first, the semantic information that may or may not exist in the URL itself, and second, the content available at the URL. Populating and configuring this blog will constitute the second half of that information, but what about the first part, what does it mean to be http://mikeenglish.net/blog/?

Why not just http://mikeenglish.net? In fact, I’ve already starting using http://mikeenglish.net as an OpenID. It’s simple and straightforward. Right now visiting that URL brings you a page with my name on it. I recently made it a hyperlink, and it links to this blog.

Why didn’t I install wordpress to the root of the domain, why does this blog live at /blog? Maybe it’s because I’m not sure what this will become, I’m not sure I’m ready to be so directly identified with something that’s still experimental, something that’s still evolving and growing. And yet, providing a home for my online identity is exactly why I’ve created this blog. Perhaps then, the relegating of this content to /blog should be taken as a gesture that the development of my online identity is still in early beta.

Part of my goal with this blog is to create a real home for my online identity. If you’ve known me for very long you’ve probably watched me move from one URL to the next like a hermit crab outgrowing shells. I’ve grown tired of moving from one network to the next without anyplace to really hang my hat. My solution is to attempt building myself this space.

What I’d like is something akin to what Facebook is becoming, but open. (more on that later, as I continue to figure out what exactly it is I want this to be)

An interesting thing happened this evening; I re-discovered the DiSo project, but I learned much more about it this time than I had in the past. What I found is that to really learn what the project was doing, I had to learn who exactly was working on it.

I’ve grown so accustomed to the old media of broadcasting, that I first assumed if I found the project website, I’d learn everything I needed to know. Instead, I was surprised to find that there was much more information distributed across various blogs and social networks than there was in any one centralized location. I was forced to look at the project as the work of people.

Perhaps it’s fitting that DiSo would operate in this fashion.  It gives me a lot of hope that the new forms of social media are going to put people back in control of technology and bring online social interaction back in touch with authentic personhood.

This is the hope that goes in to building this home.