Make a list of all your online identities [eg A quick audit of mine includes myCSU e-box, Interact, e-mail accounts, Web pages, blog, wikis, Podcasting channel, MOOs, ZOPE, athene, broadband ISP, MORPGs, Moodle, Google services...]
Using the following question from Jordan et al (2003) :
- Do you show multiple identities or are you consistent across all instances? I have multiple identities which comes about from intention of separating y professional and personal lives. When I first went online, as it were, with flickr and blogger I chose to use a pseudonym. However I later started to feel that the pseudonym was somehow wrong - that if I wanted to talk to people, wanted to actually have conversations on various online communities of interest; then I'd be better off using my first name.surname initial as my ID. Then I started to think that I'd be better off simply having a .name domain and linking things back to that (professional and personal). I then realised that this happening anyway I started to use more things in the Google universe and all of those things tied back to my gmail address anyway. I still have concerns and most of these concerns revolve around disclosure and privacy. Do I really want to share with just whoever bothers to google search me? Sometimes I care more than others, but I think overall that maintaining a distinction between my personal and professional lives is probably best overall. After all I can always share with people that I choose to with anyway.
- What does your "persistent identity" online say about you, and what shouldn't it say? My persistent identity speaks about my level of trust in placing information about me into the public domain as it is incorporated into the architecture of the Internet. Ultimately a persistent identity that is shared more widely across websites provides opportunities for people to more smoothly get into contact with me or to share interests. If I'm willing to go down the road of having a persistent online identity I open myself up to the possibility of meeting people who share interests, affinities or complementary capabilities across the widest range of social networks. This raises the question about how much I can trust that network - a perhaps myself to do the appropriate thing whilst online. Online trust / verification systems will come into play at the juncture of these questions. But they're other questions :) What shouldn't my persistent identity say? Well, it certainly shouldn't say anything negative about me in a way damages my personal reputation. There's an old Boomtown Rats song, Someone's Looking at Your with a line at the end of the song "Don't flatter yourself, nobody's listening". The song also mentions the idea of 'with walls as thin as these'. Perhaps that's the key metaphor to consider: Even if I/we wall our online lives into many partitions and effectively wall this part of our life off from that part of our life. Well ultimately these barriers are pretty small and are probably really transparent to anyone with the first idea about Internet security and privacy. People are always looking / listening / responding / reviewing you anyway. If people are listening - don't say anything that it's inconsistent with who you are and what you stand for.
- Analyse and comment on other aspects of your 'persistent identity' across all those multiple identities. This entries running on. One last thing that I would say about my persistent identity is that I am becoming more relaxed about it over time and to some extent the boundaries between my private, work and study identities has been tending to merge and overlap somewhat over the past few years. This is of my own doing as I find that work and play - are to some extent - merging.
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