Distributed Identity

[Image by ArielP]

Who am I?

It depends who you ask, or what I'm doing.

I've always believed that there is a certain contextual fluidity to identity - we are different people around different people. That isn't to say we are all being false, rather that identity is an intensely complex construct and we don't have it all on display all the time. Certain situations and people bring out certain aspects of who we are and that version of you is simply one facet through which people perceive the whole.

That also doesn't mean you are being different people each time - consistency is the defining charateristic of, well, your character.

[What kind of person is she? A happy person. This means "She is usually happy". Without any consisitency, you couldn't really be said to have any identity at all. You could be erratic, but consistently so, which isn't the same thing as being random.]

Now what happens when lots of different people are with you at the same time? Or indeed all the time?

The idea of identity changes online and those changes are becoming increasingly significant. First of all, the distinction between your private and your public life begins to blur.

Increasingly, having an online footprint is a prerequisite for social interaction, especially, but not exclusively, among the young - FT recently called under 24s the networked generation in reference to their online behaviours and Computerworld recently posed the existential question:

If someone searches for you on the Web and comes up empty-handed, do you exist?

As the article points out, recruiters are using the web to check out applicants and they posit that soon, if you don't exist online, it may count against you.

Which, finally, brings me to Distributed Identity.

If you were to look for me online, you'd find lots of different mes.

There's TIGS, Flickr Me, Myspace Me, Ning Me, LinkedIn Me, Orkut Me, Del.icio.us Me,  My Twitterings, Last FM Me and, pretty soon I imagine, even a Facebook Me [as hard as I've resisted I fear it's inevitable] - and that's just the stuff with profiles.

Online identity is a distributed construct, with different elements - professional, personal, different interests etc - represented in different ways on different platforms. If you're under 24 you may well have profiles / pages on MSN Spaces, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo and each will no doubt be slightly different. This is a goldmine of behavioural research information about how people think about themselves, and the way they want the world to see them in different contexts, including, often, what brands they feel strongly enough about to use as signifiers of who they are.

A new start up called Zoolit has just launched that allows you to list all your personal sites - an identity aggregator, if you will.

This distributed identity, archived online, throws up all kinds of interesting new situations. Y0u have to be careful what you say: you might get Dooced [lose your job because of an online comment] or expose your sexual exploits to a potential employer.

But, perhaps more interestingly, you can demonstrate the different facets of who you are and let people access you via the  area that interests them.

Which is also possibly a model for how brands could exist online. There's a great post here about Brand Portals, but it occurs to me that brands could distribute their identity across different platforms and elements - just like we do - and thus engage different groups in ways that are relevant to them.

Which is exactly what new agency Zeus Jones has done. Their page is nothing more than an aggregation of their distributed online identity. As they point out:

Zeus Jones lives in many places online

Just like we do.

Comments

[Helen]

Yes, yes and yes.

This feels like a better version of the post I've been wanting to write for ages, but haven't because I've never managed to successfully marshall my thoughts.

Only I'd have talked about the different facets of identity as faces. I'm obsessed with the idea of face. I see concrete identity as elusive, though something you can get a rough approximation of by peering in through the many different faces an individual projects - or at least the ones they deign to let you see.

[Charles Frith]

I wouldn't share that soft spot for Def Leopard though.

http://www.last.fm/user/TIGS

... Great post again. A book in itself this one.

[The Dead Artist]

been struggling with this one myself. Great post.

[Faris]

Scary - haven't played with Last FM for a while and it's decided I'm a heavy metal kid - ever read the article "Help my Tivo thinks I'm gay"? ;-p

[Faris]

O wait that's not me. Another novel issue thrown up by distributed identity - keeping track of who you are where...

[Noah Brier]

Faris, with you all the way. I think blogs are increasingly becoming that hub for your online identity. Just at this site you have your writing, flickr photos (in the badge), blogs you read, etc. Personally I also pull in all my del.icio.us links. Also, from a brand perspective I quite like what VW has done with VW.com -- a big search box on the home page says to me that assets can be scattered on the web and VW.com is the aggregator (though I haven't dug deep enough to know if it's true).

[Charles Frith]

I"m not sure if this is me but we're definitely dating on facebook now ;)

[Adam]

But.

Brands aren't people.

???

[Faris]

Hi Adam!

It's true - brands are not people, despite the fact the consumers ascribe personality traits to them, as Stephen King demonstrated so revealingly in the 70s.

However, what I was suggesting was that brands might present themselves in an analagous fashion, distributing their identity across different ideas and online platforms relevant to those ideas.

Although, in the case of Zeus Jones, the brand conceit is indeed that it is a person, which confuses things slightly ;-p

[Ramzi Yakob]

Hi Faris,

I see what you mean but from personal experience I've found that no matter where I am on or offline I am the same person. Of course different situations will change a person's mood. An example would be in a highly visible offline situation such as a job interview, I'm still going to be me, but I'm not going to share my most inner most thoughts if I knew they were controversial, just as I wouldn't in a highly visible place online.

Peoples' personalities don't change when they're online - they change depending on their context regardless of if they are on or offline. If I'm sat in the pub with my senior management my tone is going to be different the one used in the office, and that is the same online. If my line manager chooses to add me to his MSN address and then shoot the sh*t with me outside of office hours about where to download torrents then I straight away talk to him as my subordinate as he will have taken the place of the Padewan lol.

I'm confused now and I've gone on far too long! Hope you're ok and things :)

[Adam]

Hey Faris,

Brands are have always attempted to be all things to all people. And do we trust flesh-people who 'openly' act like that? Nope.

Unfortunately this people-web social media thing we've constructed is ALL about people. 'Non-people' people tend to stick out somewhat.

To me it's very simple. People, the real kind, can see straight through things pretending to human. These 'puppet-people- straw man-brands' you want to create are ridiculous. I mean, *pokes at it*, they're dead. What an insult to anyone's intelligence to expect them to believe otherwise. What an insult to yours to even try.

Brands do not have an identity in the way a human does. To make your 'anything can be a brand' equation work you have to narrow the range of what a human being can be. Not good.

Now look, that all sounds a little right-on and you're not the only poor sucker to have swallowed whole the ad industry's own commodity ideology as truth. I work in the industry too. But, well, y'know, I'm still in touch with the laws of reality.

This idea that even people have become brands is so depressing. What that actually means is the 'image of that person' has become a brand. Remember that: the image. We don't live in an image culture anymore. Of course there are still echoes of it. And I would locate many of the various 'brand 2.0/utility/enagagement' theories precisely within that echo. Rear-view mirror thinking.

What's happening here is that 'brands' are still clinging on to the idea that there's media out there to attach themselves to.
The misunderstanding is due to an odd word: 'fragmentation'. Actually media isn't fragmenting, it's imploding upon the person. We now have to take into account the 'me' in media. Just like Nathan Barly predicted: we have all become are own 'self-facilitating media nodes'. Obviously I'm referencing McLuhan's extensions of man here.

The problem for brands is that we are moving away from an image culture back to an oral/tribal culture: blogs, twitters, flickrs = all oral/tribal mediums. Not literate, not linear, not static. Rather, conversational, conducive to storytelling, myth-making, alive and homely where dead bodies (brands) get carried out of the house.

Brands can't communicate effectively because they aren't people, have no mouths, have no me, no internal motivations, nor desires. Of course, like any puppet, you can make it, display, jerk, sound and flickr. But the sort of fluid engagement you are suggesting, even though quite possible with the software, is too complex, too human.

Yes you can 'man manage' the brand for a while, pull a few strings, but brands are a relic of a past image-based culture. If you want Nike to a person, get the CEO to change his name and start blogging on MySpace. Anything less is ... 'branding'.

I can't even type the word 'brand' without smirking. Like I keep telling people (using rambling comments on the blogs I admire) forget brands, and get back to products and services. There's no need for brands because there's no need to 'mediate' or 'package' your product or service. All the world's packaging blew off when some guy pressed the on switch for the internet.

Stephen King? The 70s? Focus groups? No thanks.

God, I'm so critical about the industry and its orthodoxies. And openly on a blog's comments! No future jobs for me, then :^(

[zeroinfluencer]

Hey Faris, nice post.

Have a watch of this:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrpajcAgR1E

Superb video (in the style of Lessig) about distributed identity.

Some services you might be interested in
http://www.visiblepath.com/ (Just launched)
http://peopleaggregator.com/ (Doesn't lock in your data.)
And of course open ID. http://openid.net/

The value of distributed networks as transactional media production was something I was thinking about last year:

http://zeroinfluence.wordpress.com/2006/10/20/identity-as-a-pound-of-flesh/

Regarding the point that Brands are not people, the legal framework of corporations that enable them to own things creates a 'Juristic Person'.

The difference between flesh and blood and a Juristic person is less about liability but 'semantics and constitutional protections'.

This limitation of free speech for a brand is interesting with regards to 'projects' like Zeus Jones. What a brand wants to 'say' and what it cant, is perhaps the space individuals are about to experience when identities become distributed.

Our blogs, profiles and comments scattered over the web are time based and our opinions change from day to day. Distributed identities and transmedia campaigns have to work with the same potential contradictions. Our peers know how to understand/filter these personality changes. Can brands, as a corporate persona, have that understanding from the public?

[Adam]

And

http://www.attentiontrust.org/

[Charles Frith]

HI Adam, I disagree with you, in a friendly let's not turn up the flame throwers kind of way. So I'll tuck the transactional analysis in the satchel for the day we can mull this one over a pint. In short I think it's a lot more complex than you suggest and frankly I'd rather hang out with my Apple nanopod than a quite a lot of people. She has more character, her podcasts are more interesting and engaging. She's definitely more stylish and doesn't answer back. Seriously. Poke some of those people you think have 'personality' or identity. They don't. This doesn't apply to you. Particularly if you respond :)

[Faris]

Whoa Adam!

You seem to have some issues with brands mate! I love Bill Hicks more than the next guy but I still think we can work on this to make it better for everyone....

Whilst again I take your point in some ways, I think you are confusing metaphor with descriptor. No one thinks brands are people, but the construct of identity is a useful analogy for how brands operate, both in communication terms and cognitively.

And, whilst twitter et al are verbal mechanisms in some sense, in a literal sense of course they aren't - they are, well, literate. And therefore qualified by the same textual properties espoused in Plato's Phaedrus. Whilst they share, in some ways, the immediacy of speech, they are static, archived and can be transmitted indefinitely onwards.

I have no idea what the laws of reality are, but they sound awesome.

I love Nathan Barley. Season 2 is apparently in production. We are indeed all nodes ;-p

Anyway. I take your point, in an ideal world products and services would all be so good that brands wouldn't need building by other means - see Google. Or something. But I think that would require defendable ongoing innovation advantage, which is unlikely with the internet and that, otherwise products would all become commodities. Or something.

Hi Dave! Loving the identity 2.0. Isn't it great that everything is 2.0 now ;)

I do wonder about how much we ask of people out there. But then I remember that soon the people out there - passive massive - will be replaced by another bunch who grew up different, with the Internet and that, and will navigate complexity like we read a book.

Although I did see a talk last night which is all about simplicity that seemed to makes a lot sense. Will post it in a bit.

[Adam]

Hey Faris, Dave and Charles.

You'll have to forgive my tone. I'm a trash talker by nature. It's really nothing personal. I'll just kick the isht out of your words and expect you to do the very same.

It's amusing, no?

And at it does distract you from writing fluffy ad-man speak about bwands. Sooo cute. Go show Teacher. Gold star.

[Faris]

Hi Adam! No worries buddy - it is but I guess you'll have noticed that the plannersphere is a bit more on the polite / positive side than bbs flame wars of old ;)

But, really, fluffy ad-man speak? Moi?

;-p

[Adam]

Hehe

Polite, I know. And gushy, groupthinky, inbred and snore...

I only read 3 planner blogs now. Even still I have to wade through a pool sycophantic slime to find a nugget of something new AND interesting.

But it IS worth the effort. Because despite yourselves you occasionally say something silly that needs ripping apart in comments. So, cheers for that! Joke. Can't help myself.

So, can I come over again? I kinda like it here. I promise to behave.

BTW I'm not a planner. I never signed your code. Plannersphere, indeed. More like Plannersoblong.

[Faris]

Of course you can mate - we all need to mix it up once in a while.

And yes groupthink can be bad. And sycophancy is bad. But being mutually supportive is good. I think.

You don't need to be planner - everyone is welcome in the oblong. I'm not a planner anyway, I'm a ninja.

Kiss.

[Adam]

Ewww.. geh'roff!

;^)

[Marcus @ Culturemaking]

And there was me thinking that this kind of entertainment was only ever available on Adliterate! ;)

[Tiffany]

Great dialogue!

This distributed identity idea reminds me of a blog I recently discovered. You probably know it but hey - http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ - there are some amazing articles there.

big X

[giles rhys jones]

interesting how brands/people behave in different places online and i wonder if there are consistent traits depending on where you are. youtube is a nightclub and jaiku is a library and people behave the same or places bring out different behaviours: gregarious bloke on flickr is shy and retiring on twitter...

g