Manage your online identity.This Friday, Terrell will present ClaimID to the CRADLE Symposia at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science. The talk will run from 12 noon to 1pm, and it will be located in 208 Manning Hall (directions) on UNC’s campus (Chapel Hill, NC). This event is open to the public, so if you’d like to come out and discuss claimID, please feel free.
Boxes and Arrows has an interview with Adam Greenfield, author of the just released Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.
The interview delves into what Adam thinks about how we’ll all deal with being connected all the time and always having to be ‘on’. The following two questions and answers are spot on.
ClaimID is designed to address some of these same concerns - it allows a new presentation of self - a voice, a description that is otherwise only being defined by the search engines’ results.
B&A: Then let’s talk about opting out. When we are in control, we have the option to hide, to consider which face to put forward, even to manipulate. Will we still have this ability? And if not, are people ready to lose this control?
AG: I’m not so sure we will retain much of this ability, which in sociology is generally referred to as “presentation of the self.” With so much information about our past and current activities available to be searched, cross-referenced, and made available in real time, when we meet someone for the first time, we are likely going to lose control over the image we present to them.
Imagine what this will look like in practice. Whether you are interviewing a prospective new hire, meeting a potential romantic interest for the first time, or simply sitting next to someone on a plane, you no longer have to take a person at face value. It’s easy to see that this can occasionally be very useful, if you happen to be on the empowered end of the transaction. The trouble is that this ambient intelligence—facilitated by a ubiquitous deployment of informatic systems—cuts both ways.
And with[out] the ability to control how others see us, I believe that we lose also a certain protective and beneficial hypocrisy that allows us to function as a society. We all, without exception, have habits, behaviors, experiences that we don’t necessarily want to share with the wider world. When you evert these experiences, and archive them, and tag them with metadata, and make them persistently accessible, it gets very difficult indeed for anyone to maintain the unimpeachable public façade our current mores require of us.
This is something that people who consider ubiquitous computing from a purely instrumental or technical perspective frequently miss: it’s not just a change in the way we use computers, it’s an alteration in some of the very foundations of the self as it’s been constructed in the West for the last few centuries. We’re in for a wild ride.
B&A: You know that when we’re doing something “on the record,” we tend to act and speak a bit differently, even in contrived ways at times. So how will this awareness of everyware affect how we present ourselves?
AG: Well, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Anyone who’s had, for one reason or another, to get used to being in front of cameras or microphones with any degree of regularity knows how hard it is to be “natural” when confronted with the prospect of being recorded, or transmitted to a large audience, or both.
When artifacts like cameras and microphones (to say nothing of sensors capable of recording one’s position and location, and verifying one’s identity via unique biometric signatures like retinal patterns or even gait period) are embedded in the objects and surfaces of everyday life, we all potentially become subject to the most intense kind of mediation. Barring some regulatory or other intervention, we’ll be forced to assume that we’re at least potentially “on,” just about all the time. And the sheer ubiquity of output modes offered by the robust deployment of everyware means that whatever once goes into the network can come out again just about anywhere.
Among other complications, this strikes me as being very likely to give rise to many of what MIT sociology professor Gary T. Marx calls “border crossings”: irruptions of personal information at an unexpected place or a time, in an unexpected context. Again, I don’t think we’re even remotely prepared for what this is going to do to social cohesion.
Adam Greenfield is living in tomorrow’s awareness today. We all should learn from this and raise our communal understanding of what it means to live online. Soon, there will be no distinction between what is online and what is not. It will not be a “different place”. It will be where we are, where we live. And it will be here very soon.
We’ve now been watching claimID in the wild for just over a month. A few people in particular have caught our eye in the way they’re using claimID to manage their own online identity.
Brian Benzinger - Solution Watch - post about claimID
We’ve written about Brian before and his coverage of our beta launch. We would be remiss without mentioning him again here. And love that new layout, Brian. Very nice.
Michael has the distinction of having a very non-unique name. He has used the Not Me / Not By Me categorization of claimID to point out that he’s none of those other guys. Michael gets it.
Pretty much all Google results for “Stowe Boyd” are him. Not exactly our average use case. Hi Stowe!
Ottmar Liebert - Site - post about claimID
Ottmar has also posted about claimID and sent a bit of traffic to us. We love the mindfulness bell!
Alex has actually taken the unusual step of pointing his domain root to his claimID page - go ahead, click on alexm.org. We thought through most things we’ve seen people do with claimID - but not this one. Makes us feel confident we’ve hit upon something that really resonates.
Patrick Cormier - Information Management Now
Patrick has gone out of his way to collect a great many resources about himself and the things he is involved with here at claimID. He was also the first person we noticed using his claimID page to vouch/speak for him in a public space that wasn’t his own blog.
Derek Punsalan - 5ThirtyOne - post about claimID
Derek has written a great post on his blog about claimID and sent quite a bit of traffic our way. Thanks Derek.
Dawn has amassed quite a collection of links about herself here at claimID. This is exactly the kind of proactive use we envisioned when building claimID.
And, it’s her birthday today! Happy Birthday from claimID!
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