Green Tea Ice Cream

One of the things that’s puzzled me since way back when is the nature of one’s identity online and the real scale of the diaspora of ‘me’s spread across the Net (can I say the Diasporic Me? or You?).

Wait! Come back! I can’t promise I’ve got anything original to say on the subject but with the number of different channels available to us now reaching a very critical mass, anyone who puts finger to keyboard really needs to have a very clear of notion of exactly who is writing, let alone whom they’re writing for. And it certainly seems, given the number of identity management protocols kicking off (e.g OpenID, MicroID, and the crowded space of identity search as highlighted by Techcrunch recently also should be seen as relevant here), to be concerning a lot of other people. Oh, and before I get going, I’m not going to explore my own preconceptions of what an identity is (uncompromisingly socially constructed, for the record.)

Let’s take an inventory of my own split personalities.

First to hand is obviously the “Michael Clarke” of Green Tea Ice Cream. Now the most casual bit of reflection shows that “Michael Clarke” is very far from being the authentic, off-line “Michael Clarke” beloved (or something) of all who know him. On the face of it, the MC of GTIC doesn’t seem to have a personal life, writes obsessively about the internet (with a vaguely ideological slant creeping in not infrequently) and uses too many parenthesis (a habit which I’ll admit every single instantiation of his identity diaspora seem prone to). Hopefully “Michael Clarke” isn’t the ‘resume’ blog beloved of Bokardo but it’s certainly intended to have a focus on a specific set of issues surrounding work I’m actually paid to do.

But, pace Bokardo, it isn’t the only one. Second up is the “MichaelC” of twitter. MichaelC definitely has a life, barring the fact that some people might argue that his very presence on Twitter mitigates against this. I don’t know if its a life that speaks for or against me but I’ve argued elsewhere that one of the side effects of Web 2.0 is that we need to learn to accept a fully rounded person in a way that our working lives have been able to avoid to date.

With this in mind, we come to the family oriented blog I’ve kept since last September. This is something I’m consciously trying to keep hermetically sealed off from the Michael Clarke of GTIC. I don’t use my real name, no photographs of me or mine appear, I don’t specify where I live beyond South London and so on.

That’s three. LinkedIn is pretty much an online CV, Facebook doesn’t offer the casual stalker much in my particular case but you’ll probably learn an awful lot about our dusty corner of the service industry we work in. Let’s throw in “redmedicine” on del.icio.us, a membership of a nascent network on Ning, a recently created SL identity (too much interesting stuff being written about Second Life at the moment to leave it alone) and my eMusic membership. The last shows the hidden but very real nub of a problem. Once upon a time, you went onto a site, bought something and went away. Then Amazon invented the large scale customer review. Other people might have got there first but Amazon turned it into a science. Other sites now have taken the concept and kicked it out of the ball park - on eMusic, you can see what I’ve bought, what’s in my ‘saved for later’, anything that’s in my profile. In fact, most e-commerce sites have, for years, operated on a social-networking level as a default. If you don’t turn on your privacy items, hey presto - another online you jumps out of the mirror (not unlike the replicating pop princess at the end of William Gibson’s Idoru).

So I don’t have three or four identities - I have dozens. And each one of them says something different about me. Put them together, you pretty much have my entire life (and if you want the details, the bald chronology is waiting to be read on LinkedIn).

On my bad days, I do find myself asking, is all this really a good idea?

Don’t know yet. Once upon a time, remember, this was the norm and now that real villages of one kind or another seem to be forming again - my parenting blog definitely lives in a little village of people I’ve never met but who’s everyday rhythm of life is increasingly familiar to me - being immersed in the flow of other people’s lives (I relate this to the concept of ambient intimacy outlined by Leisa Reichelt) is gradually becoming our default state of existence once again.

If you’ve been brought up and lived in cities all your life, this is a disruptive culture shock at a deep level. The habitual practice of keeping my different identities segmented is entirely down to assumptions as to what individuals who know me in one walk of life might think of me in another, or the advantage they might take of certain kinds of information. But that wouldn’t have made sense in a Greek Polis. It wouldn’t have worked in a medieval manor. I’m hoping that, Kathy Sierra’s ordeal notwithstanding, it won’t be long before, in an entirely positive way, it won’t work online.

(P.S. After writing this, I went and stuck a stick in the anthill that is Technorati to see what other perspectives on the evolution of online identity are lurking out there from the great and the good. Bill Thompson writes about his experiences on BBC News. Grant McCracken picks up on his use of the word cloudiness. Grant’s post was pulled from Sam Ford’s blog who comments on the dangers of overstating the changes involved. For me, it’s not entirely a change and not a progression either. I’m suspicious of big, holistic  explanations but it seems like a spiraling round to another kind of socialization, but still one that would have been comprehensible to other humans from other times. Who would Eric the Red have been, for example, without the stories that went before him? And Eric’s reputation was an entirely different kind of beast to Paris Hilton’s. But anyway…)