Liquid Learning

Digital Identity Matters

The new Rhizome report highlights the issues we face when dealing with our online identities. The material is released as an open access resource and is aimed at contributing to a deeper understanding of digital identity and the impact it can have on the individual and those around them. It will be of relevance to anyone who uses the Internet to disclose personal information about themselves – be it purposefully through the use of social media tools or as a result of work-based professional activities. The report is available for here:

Download Rhizome AwarenessReport.pdf (3128.5K).

Citation: Warburton, S. (ed.) 2010.  Digital Identity Matters. London: King’s College London

Digital Identity and Social Media CFC

Call for proposals deadline: November 30th 2009
Full chapters by: January 30th 2010

Over the past year I have been exploring the impact of new media and emerging technologies on understandings of digital (or online) under the Eduserv funded Rhizome Project. In that time digital identity has become a topic of debate in many different fora. As part of this process of engaging in debate and grappling with the issues that surround digital identity there is now a Call for Chapters for a new book entitled "Digital Identity and Social Media" which will be published by IGI Global in early 2011. It is an exciting project and we encourage anyone with an interest in digital identity matters to look through the details and send us a proposal. Submissions on any of the following themes are welcome:

• Conceptual frameworks and approaches to understanding digital identity;
• The impact of new technologies, social software and social media, on conceptualisations of [digital] identity;
• Authenticity and trust in identity based transactions;
• Machine mediated identities;
• Digital identity management - defending identity, reputation management and risk;
• The digital self and blurring boundaries between public and private spaces;
• Lifelong learning and the importance of digital identity for transitions from school to adult life and beyond;
• Negotiating individual, group, community and network based digital identities;
• Personalisation software and the impact on digital identities;
• The economic, societal, ethical and political issues raised by the increased availability of personal information;
• Digital literacies and accessibility in relation to digital identities;
• Identity, trust and authenticity in social networks;
• Relations between communities, networks, groups and individual identities;
• Personalisation technologies and digital identity;
• Cultural dynamics of online identity;
• Social media and emerging identity practices;
• Presence technologies, online visibility and digital identity.

Full Call for Chapters here: Download CFC_DigitalIdentity_Book.pdf (183.4K)

We look forward to hearing from you.

Stories of digital identity - tales from twitter

The Rhizome project has been helping to organise the Eduserv Digital Identity event which is being held at the British Library on 8 January 2009. Full details of the event are available here. But in brief, the approach for the day is to run a patterns workshop with the help of the Planet project, using a defined methodology to share the personal stories of our 35 plus participants in relation to their experiences of 'digital identity'. To do this we have solicited stories (or cases) from the invited group coming to the event and provided a template (STARR - see below) to help structure each submission. These are held on the Planet Xwiki site in a searchable database. Telling a story is an interesting and thought provoking exercise exercise and we welcome anyone to come to the site to submit a personal narrative that they might have to share about digital identity. This is a copy of the case I have submitted for the event:

Name of Story: "Twitter-versed"

Situation (what is the setting or context for this case study?):

The context for this case study is what questions are raised about the nature of ones online presence/identity when one becomes embedded in a 'twitter community' (in this case a modest size of around 100 followers/following). Once embedded within an established community there is a nagging pressure to remain plugged into the Twitter life stream, almost constantly, and sometimes to the detriment of other activities. It is also a disruptive communication space in the sense that ones audience is heterogeneous - comprised of the so-called @-crowd, friends, colleagues, and the extended network of followers and follower's of followers who might read be reached through 'retweets'. So how do you even start writing a message in twitter? No wonder so many tweets read like descriptive statements of current or intended activity. Cup of tea anyone?

Task (what was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?)

The problem or the central point of the story (like all good narratives) revolves around a love-hate relationship ... what exactly is this Twitter thing - a multi-channel conversation, a pest, an addiction, redundancy looming for SMS on my mobile phone, a potential educational tool, community bonding, a self promotion vehicle for over excitable egos, a live RSS channel, a reputation nightmare waiting to happen? The first problem is the flow of information - constant and distracting - an extra time burden layered on top of of the demands of an overflowing inbox. Yet why do I experience a strange feeling of unease if I do not 'tweet' at least once per day? Is it the existential fear of dropping out of the community if my presence is not marked in some way? Or is that my digital identity or my digital territory will be lost and I will cease to exist? And therein lies the second problem of Twitter. To I watch the flow of noisy chatter is to feel it also exert an invasive and forceful desire for my presence - the need to present some kind of digestible form of real identity into a streamed digital, micro version. But how? And if it is not possible then how to avoid the frustrations Twitter can present from only watching the backwards and forwards of others?

Actions (what was done to fulfill the task?)

How could I engage/disengage, without deleting my Twitter account that that has served useful purposes? My solution was on reflection, to try and define a simple set of rules for 'managed' use. Perhaps rules is too strong a word, these were more like notes to self:

• Only switch on my Twitter feeds when I actually have free time and I am interested in getting updates on what the community is up to;
• To mainly use Twitter if I actually have something to say to someone in particular - in other words - to communicate with my @-crowd. This kind of conversation immediately feels more personal and comfortable for me;
• To take advantage of direct messaging as a key tool, one that has always given good response times from the recipients;

Results (what happened? was is a success? what contributed to the outcomes?)

Partial success - the rules were a little too rigid to be obeyed with ease. But, not being plugged in all the time did provide some freedom and space to concentrate on other matters - this strategy did go hand in hand with a concerted effort at dealing with email more effectively ... to give space for concentrated writing tasks. I still maintain an uneasy alliance Twitter, knowing that it will never satisfactorily reflect a digital identity that coheres with my internal sense of self. It feels unnatural to compose intermittent micro-statements that say everything and nothing - it often feels to me that I am shouting into a vast empty space "I am here, I am here" and waiting for an answer even if my statements do not directly ask for one. But this is also the compelling nature of community participation and whether I like it or not I do take my voice from one modality to another, adjusting to the affordances of the technology, threading my way trough the strands of my online and offline communities - wherever they may be.

Reflections and Lessons Learned (what did you learn from the experience?)

You get 140 characters per tweet. Twitter seems to demand an all or nothing response. Do I keep posting to build something that makes sense over an extended timeline, in other words a conversation/narrative, or simply tweet once in a while that I am still alive. I am not going to disappear from the world if I do not Twitter but I would be uncomfortable not having access. My online identity is distributed across many platforms and spaces and I choose to see my blog as one of the key nodes. In my blog or indeed Facebook I feel far more in control of the space I speak from, and the potential audience reaction - even if that is not truly within my power to control. Two issues that still disturb me are the illusion of ephemerality and the partial, unstructured nature of the community. Twitter feels like a spoken conversation yet look back and the tracks remain. Twitter also bends attention to itself and creates a certain exclusivity where sometimes I, for one, can forget that not everyone I know is a Twitter user.

Twitter is a strange animal - curiously addictive but also difficult to work out what value it has - it can be infuriating and gripping in one and the same moment. It is a space of distributed social conversation that blurs community boundaries and for me it represents another site where digital personas are performed ... something that makes Twitter worthy of detailed study.

Links to other posts and articles on Twitter that reflect some of the themes raised here:

• http://www.darcynorman.net/2008/10/25/on-twitter/
• http://www.margaperez.com/?p=177
• http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/
• http://www.chrisbrogan.com/a-day-without-twitter/
• http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2008/12/the-crowd.html
• http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/twitter/twitter.pdf
• http://gigaom.com/2008/12/28/on-twitter-followers-are-not-really-friends/

  

Who am i? ... mashed-up, disaggregated and distributed

What does digital identity mean to you? Do you care? As more of our lives, from personal to professional activities, find their way online how do we cope with managing our digital presence(s)? Can we ever keep the 'personal' separate from 'professional' when tools and services mash-up our online identities in ways that are beyond our control?

The Rhizome project, funded by Eduserv, is a 14 month exploration of digital identities across learning, teaching and research.

Why rhizome? This project addresses, in part, the issues surrounding the increasingly fractured nature of the self when our online identities become distributed across multiple sites and services. Rhizome is a Deleuzian concept that has energised thinking and creativity in the arts, science and philosophy. It is used in this project as a cipher, or a departure point for representing digital identities as:

• decentralised
• unpredictable
• connected
• branching in many directions
• having multiple entry points
• with no single true view, only partial perspectives
• and constituted as a multiplicity of dimensions where we lose the illusion of the objective all seeing eye/I

Deleuze leads us to cartography and the map, a space which has no privileged entry point and is always open to change. This is a metaphor we have played on with our chosen technical platform - Netvibes - a representation that captures the multiple views and entry points to our work.

The project is taking a mutli-layered approach via narrative inquiry and scenario mapping to study the construction and deconstruction of digital identities (more detail on the methodology) and an overview of how we are planning our 14 months of work is outlined here in our 21 slide presentation:

Rhizome Project: exploring digital identities

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: online launch)

We welcome participation as the project develops! Please see the project home at http://www.rhizomeproject.org and the project blog.

Deleuze & Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. and Foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U. of Minneso ta Press, 1987.

Sermijn, Devlieger and Loots (2008). The Narrative Construction of the Self: Selfhood as a Rhizomatic Story. Qualitative Inquiry, (14)4:632–650.

 

Waiting for myself

An interesting moment in transgressing my own boundaries between self and avatar. Rarely have we appeared together and here only in the name of science.

This video came about from a little research that was carried out in advance of an upcoming, 7th July, symposium that we will be presenting to a remote audience in Kuala Lumpar. We cannot be there physically so my question was, if we decide to use Second Life in what ways can we create maximum social presence?

I am an immersionist, that is I let StevenW build his own space inside SL, yet I am interested in ways to move information in and out of Second Life, punching holes through the membrane and linking in-world and out-of-world experiences. The porosity of SL has changed over time with channels opening for blogging; twitter, web-browsing, SL to Flickr, audio, facebook links, and streaming video. Taking the scenario of a face-2-face conference blended with SL participants I took a peek at the different ways to stream live video into SL. Inspired by posts from both AndyPowell and Rob Smart's blogs I set up a quick trial with Veodia, knowing their live video webstreaming service is now available for free and is offered in a format compatible with Second Life.

So how was it? Well simple, so simple I was left wondering what the catch was, bandwidth issues aside. Here is a quick run through of the steps I followed:

• Opened an account with Veodia, a straightforward exercise;
• Clicked through the screens to start my first broadcast;
• Pressed the appropriate button and let my Apple MacPro do the audio-video and capture;
• Previewed the stream to check I was on air and then copied the rtsp URL provided by Veodia from the live broadcast page;
• Launched Second Life;
• Made a coffee while I waited to get in-world ;)
• Knocked up a quick media screen, set the textures and then pasted the rtsp stream URL into the land parcel settings;
• Pressed the media player button in SL;
• Bingo, there I was alive and kicking in the virtual universe.

Whether we will use this for the symposium I am still unsure, my preference I think would be to have the audience streamed into SL so that we have some sense of those who are watching and listening in the conference room. Testing the set-up with fellow panelists uncovered three issues that are driving me away from using SL as a conferencing tool:

• First and most obvious is the heavy bandwidth requirements for this configuration and the related issue of delay, around 3-5 seconds, between the capture and delivery of the video stream;
• Second is the lack of status or feedback indicators, the kind of thing you find when using a tool like Elluminate where you can ask the audience questions and get feedback through a series of emoticons that includes useful items like the 'hands-up' attention grabber;
• Third follows a similar line and concerns the difficulty in providing a mechanism for live audience participation. Setting up a back channel would be an ideal solution and making use of the main SL chat window would be the natural place for this. Yet to my knowledge it is still impossible to remotely work with SL chat so delegates would need to log into SL if they wanted to use the chat window. The option of using a lightweight client such as AjaxLife might be a solution, if the audience all have SL accounts or deploying a non-integrated chat client bought in through the in-world media browser. Both options are still not ideal.

There is perhaps a fourth reason, intimated at the start of this post, the separation of avatar and typist. My avatar and me do not appear in public together, or least not very often and somehow that feels right. The quandry of where to post snapshots of us both together, Flickr seemed at first the obvious place, confirmed to me that despite the fuzzy boundary between real and virtual identities they remain in many aspects decoupled. SL is a different space and there exists a differentiated person which goes someway to explain my discomfort in completely collapsing our two identities.

Loving your avatar: identity, immersion and empathy

At the Berlin Educa Online conference back in November 2007 I started to tackle the problematic issue of identity and identity play in Second Life. I have been consistently fascinated by what I consider one of the key attractions and confusions of SL, namely the ability to slip into another shell and build a unique presence - within what is arguably the richest and most diverse virtual setting at the present time. A large topic for a short talk - so I took a particular focus on one aspect of avatar identity: how we develop a ‘relationship’ with our avatar. Relationship may sound like an odd word to use but I choose this deliberately as for me it captures something of the  discourse that we often read when we talk about our second lives or indeed the characters we build within other online worlds (see ‘Alter Ego: avatars and their creators’ http://www.alteregobook.com).

From  analyses of blog posts and mailing lists, interviews in-world and face-to-face workshops, and from my personal experiences I discovered common threads that run through many narratives in the evolution of avatars. A number of critical points in the development of this relationship over time could be clearly identified in this mapping activity:

The graph 'Development of avatar identity and empathy in MUVEs' is the visual result of this mapping activity and gathers together these key moments along a continuous time-line that stretches from the beginnings of entering the world of SL to the point of rupture where a second avatar may be spawned to cope the complexities of changing identity in-world. The x axis time-line is plotted against a y axis that I have called 'investment' and represents not simply the amount of time we invest in 'working' on our avatars but also the sense of empathy we begin to develop with our virtual other. Running along the time-line there are two drop-out thresholds marked towards the beginning of this path, where technical, competency and 'care' barriers if not surmounted often result in no further or very limited in-world activity. Beyond these points we trace multiple and changing trajectories that reflect the often complex relations we build with our avatar. On the right-hand side three phrases of being in-world are marked out: exploration, professional activity and playfulness which as can be seen in the detailed description below as often antagonistic to one another:

1. Technical and competency threshold: The early technical and competency barriers can undoubtedly be severe for many, to the extent that even when a powerful enough graphics card and a connection with adequate bandwidth have been located, newly formed denizens enter the world only to find themselves trapped on orientation island. The competency requirements for SL are often understated and form a bewildering mix of manual dexterity, games-based visual grammar and client interface navigation that demand serious and determined attention to master. In a recently published student survey, Steve Hornik posted a reflective response to what were in effect a series of negative comments on the use of SL in his accounting course that illustrate just how frustrating to students these early steps can be:
   
   

   "I did not use it that often because it was hard to understand and was too slow on my computer. I could not grasp how to use it well."

   "Honestly, I got so confused trying to simply walk and talk to people that I just ended up getting frustrated."

   Such comments serve as a reminder to all of us who are rushing forwards to introduce such cutting edge technologies into our learning and teaching settings. This situation is not atypical as Judy Robertson reports in a recent post where she came head to head with the technical difficulties that can plague efforts even at the institutional level:

   "We have two multimedia labs full of computers which are meant to be our souped up fast computers for this module. Alas, these computers meet only the minimum spec for SL but not the recommended spec. This is the difference between a happy well adjusted lecturer and a raving maniac. The computers keep crashing. Sometimes they run terribly slowly. And to add to the circus, there were intermittent network problems. The upshot of all this was that the students got frustrated."

2. Threshold of care:  One of the most difficult moments to pin down in the process of building a virtual identity. It marks a fuzzy boundary beyond which we begin to feel an emotional pull towards our virtual self and yes, we start to care about our avatar. Our creation has become an entity, even a personality, in its own right. How does this happen and how is this possible? The clearest way of understanding this process is one that touches mainly, though not exclusively, on the concepts of social and cultural capital: the building of friendships and connections; becoming part of a community; purchasing artifacts that increase our avatar's aesthetic appeal; a variety of other cultural exchanges and physical engagements that can be as simple as building ones own in-world residence and holding a house warming party.
   
   
3. Schism: As our in-world interactions become more elaborate and diverse a moment is reached where we feel a tension between our single avatar and the multiple roles that our virtual self is able to adopt. We may exist as both a playful representation of our selves alongside a virtual presence that is comprehended as an extension of our professional lives. SL offers a vast range of highly developed sub-cultures and communities that are fun, enlightening and self-revealing to explore yet these require a level of engagement that does not always sit easily with a professional demeanor. Spending time as a neko, vampire, furry, Gorean slave or participating in other roleplaying spaces that  have corresponding dress-codes, social norms and modes of behaviour may begin to sit uncomfortably within the embodiment provided within a single avatar.
   
   
4. Managed instablity: This describes the ongoing flux between playful and professional modes of in-world existence that is, for example, revealed in lengthy discussions amongst educators (cf. SLED list) of what represents a professional appearance in SL with questions posed that tackle seemingly mundane issues of where to purchase 'correct' outfits for teaching and the 'correct' anatomical and visual configuration we expect of students, visitors and tutors alike. As 'AJ' comments (reproduced with kind permission from an original SLED list posting) this in-world tension may result in real-world action:
   

   "Beyond the psycho-babble, the reason for more than one avatar was quite simple.  At the point where my employer, a state institution, began paying the bills for my work as AJ Brooks, I felt it necessary to have a second avatar.  First off, I felt it was the ethical thing to do. Second, I wanted a CLEAR distinction between what I was doing for work and what I was doing for myself, on my own time."

   
   
5. Multiple avatars: Diverse personal definitions of self and approaches to this play/work border are clearly visible in SL profiles. Statements are found that on one hand appear to mark sameness - 'I am my avatar' - and yet on the other hand celebrate difference and possibility - 'Keep SL in SL and RL in RL'. The struggle to stabilise the tensions between multiple modes of existence within a single frame can lead to the spawning of a second avatar - a blank persona that can act as a safety valve allowing these multiple states to co-exist. Multiple avatars in effect offer multiple channels for reflecting the range of roles and identities that we take for granted in our everyday existence. This can be a liberating experience for many as it suddenly frees the creator from the behavioural pressures that dominate formal settings even when they are translated into our virtual and imaginary worlds. Multiple avatars also form part of a strategy for addressing digital reputation management issues that are currently underexposed but of increasing importance to those of us who live and work in virtual spaces.

Many of the moments described above are particularly well summed up in the SLED list post below, reproduced with kind permission from 'AJ', who describes the reasons behind the creation of his small team of avatars:

"I have three avatars. AJ Brooks is my first avatar, 1st rez date coming up in January.  This is the avatar I first came into SL with and to this day use AJ for all things work related.  AJ has never really been one to "socialize" as some of my non-education friends do, such as going to clubs, puttering around, etc...  I did, of course, visit a number of places when I first came in and didn't have a "home", but now when I go out to visit someplace, at least as AJ, it is purely business.  AJ's base of operations is the CHSS Island and is normally on from 9-5 M-F, except when needed for teaching purposes (I use AJ as the avatar for my classes also) and for conferences, etc...  AJ looks a bit like me in so much as I tried to keep facial features similar, height, and hair color also, although I will admit that he is slimmer and a bit more chiseled than I. Very recently, having run out of groups, not being able to drop any more from AJ, but needing to work with faculty, etc..., I needed to start a third avatar, an alt that would be purely a "CHSS Island maintenance guy".  I've shared land ownership, buildings, etc..., plus use that avatar for creating groups related to CHSS business.  This avatar is currently a cyborg but could certainly take another shape, but would probably not be a human form.  This is purely a utility.
Wealthy Mizser is my second avatar and owns an art gallery on Avendale called The Gallery Beleza at Avendale and also own a home on Nevi, which is also one of the five sims that make up the Avendale community.  Wealthy is usually on after 5pm and on the weekends.  Wealthy is blonde with blue eyes has a body worth every linden (as opposed to having to slave for hours at the gym, which is very non-virtual), and is definitely the one to attend a party or other social event, or even to poke around places around SL that really have nothing to do with The Gallery."

Where next? This study marks the starting point for a series of other ongoing investigations that include a review of the social nature of profile building in SL as well as a more detailed engagement with competency frameworks. So ... more to come.

The dangers of habit

Three linked ideas about seeing, the self, life and education. What is that moment when we suddenly notice something or have a moment of recognition - of a thing that has been there, in our line of sight, but has not yet registered, or maybe we saw once and now has faded and now again suddenly it leaps to the foreground of our conscious thought?

*filters* - we begin to recognise filters exist when we realise we can only ever possess a partial perspective on our lives and indeed the lives of others. There is what we 'see' and more importantly what we do *not* see. Filters, arguably, develop from:

*habit* - repetitive actions that brings about:

*desensitisation* - where certain emotions, visual stimuli, intellectualthought become the common place and commonsensical and eventually the unnoticed and in many ways the accepted and unquestioned. Ideologies by any other name.

Deleuze might say question everything, do not accept the obvious, yet do we really have the capacity to live this on a daily basis. If our social life, our existence, is so complicated with multiple possibilities then yes this complicatedness itself seems on the surface 'good' but how do we navigate and choose between these multiple possibilities that are constantly available. Choices in life do not exist on an even plane, they run like deep rivers and to swim against the seemingly natural flow or to strike a new course, against the tides that push us, then we need energy and to fight each 'barrier' to accomplish this and only in this fight do we begin to understand or find illuminated just how deeply embedded we have become in certain modes of being and thinking. Each battle erodes a part of our desire for a certain way of being, gradual compromise, for the sake of simplicity perhaps? Internally we reason these compromises, making calculations of effort versus worth, to leave enough energy for reaching goals that are in many ways undetermined and may exist simply as space for further possibility and that elusive sense of self-satisfaction. Herein, with time, we find that each of us has their own given, relative and culturally mediated sense of happiness.

So education must not simply be about learning to live mechanically in this world but surely to have the tools and abilities to create visions that can provide the possibility for thinking differently and in this, the means to visualise change and paths that might take us there. But this is two-sided in the sense that we need the capacity to deal with change and the challenges presented to our own sense of being becoming in this world. Ways of coping with the unforeseen and the unexpected. Our education, our learning is as much about creating change as it is with dealing with change and the nature of change itself.

Panic: voice kills textual play in SL

Most people (well SLers) will have by now heard, read, blogged the recent announcement by Linden Labs on the introduction of 'Voice in SL'. This has provoked a somewhat wild and wide-ranging debate on the effects, both positive and negative, that this might have on the SL world and the relations between SL inhabitants ... and interestingly the relation between the self, avatar and anonymity when playing in-world. These debates were surfaced in an article in the Second Life Herald:

"... the way many residents feel about SL is that it's an *extension* of RL, and representing the 'self' in avatar form is logically a process of reflecting RL. Other residents see with clarity the almost endless possibilities available in creating an entirely different 'self' (or many selves) from their reality, sometimes extending that 'self' outside of the grid. The rest of us fall somewhere in between these two virtual extremes, or possibly have a foot in both camps (I do). When 'Voice' was announced, a huge outpouring of anxiety was expressed by those who, given their point of reference, felt it was no more than a mortal threat to their keeping the fantasy/anonymity element of SL safe. Others, although quieter, felt it was a positive, necessary step in the evolution of the platform. And of course the rest of us fell somewhere in between.

I made a very quick comment on the full article on the SL Herald blog but felt it worthy of revisiting here. The panic that seems to surround the introduction of voice as expressed by some parts of the SL community seem to me to be generally missing the point in that fundamental shifts in the discursive space of SL must stem from widespread adoption of audio. I question whether this is actually going to be the case? My analogy would be to take a closer look at another audio technology such as Skype. How many people choose to use Skype for text based interaction (IM) rather than voice? For me, voice or text preferences must be understood within the differing contexts within they operate or are indeed situated. In Skype, text/IM is very heavily used by nearly everyone despite the audio option ... why?. Here the subtle divide between partial-asynchronous/synchronous presence is one dimension that provides each communicative modality (voice or text) with a distinctly different texture. I predict (I hate predicting ... but anyway) that it will be the similar for SL and that the balance will be firmly maintained by the appropriatenesses of IM chat except to certain types of human interaction. For some reason there seems to be an assumption that 'voice' is just better than 'text' and somehow users will be forced or coerced by an unseen natural order into voice-based interaction. Why on earth would this happen? Technology is always situated ... there is no natural hierarchy!

[one might also choose a second example here and examine SMS versus voice in mobile phone use]

Susan Sontag's journal writings

If blogs are a mongrel breed descended from the journal then the jottings discovered in the cache of notebooks left behind by Susan Sontag are illuminating to this genre of writing:

"Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself."

She continues:

"The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual daily life but rather - in many cases - offers alternatives to it."

And finally - after reading about herself in another's journal:

"... Do I feel guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes? No. One of the main (social)functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal."

Privacy and Web 2.0 technologies

A stimulating post on Web 2.0 and the "end of privacy?" from from Tim Neuman at the Institute of Education inspired by a German article ("Die dunkle Seite des Web 2.0") published on 8th Feb 2006. This is an issue of growing concern to some of us in educational establishments where students do not yet realise the full implications of the persistence of personal data that is being divulged in blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies (such as photo sharing sites like Fickr). It may not yet be standard practise to "Google" prospective employees (I would love to know if there have been any studies that have looked at this) but it is clearly possible to trace personal (non professional) commentaries, viewpoints and persuasions through and across a variety of personal publishing spaces - writings that may not be consonant with, or may even directly hamper personal career goals (disciplinary action being bought against Bloggers at their place of work perhaps being the most high profile examples). It also raises the question of how we manage or even shape our online identities cf. recent stories on spin doctoring wiki entries by US senate staff. Will there be third party tools appearing to manage and monitor our online selves, the tracks and traces we leave across cyberspace.