I spent a good part of my day yesterday attending the Identity and Identification in a Networked World symposium, put on by the Information Law Institute. The presenters are all doing very interesting work in an area that tends to draw my thinking. Fred Stutzman and danah boyd, whose work I'm familiar with, were there, but I also enjoyed Ryan Bigge's slot and got to see Dick Hardt's often-talked-about Identity 2.0 presentation.

One idea that I would have liked to bring up to hear the thoughts of all the presenters and attendees, had there been enough time after the Social Networks panel (or if I had been brave enough to volunteer a question), is the idea of the socially constructed identity. It seemed that most of what I heard took the stance that individuals were the central actor in the construction of their own networked selves, which I suppose rises partially from the illusion created by the format of an online social network profile. I would have like to hear discussion on the proposal that we are less autonomous than we seem when we interact online, and not simply in online social networks, since the perceived walled garden of these systems is not nearly as sound as it may seem.

danah actually touched upon this issue in her talk about the "Top 8" on MySpace. She explained that the "Top 8" essentially is the user allowing him/herself to be defined/affirmed/identified by another. I think this is the critical aspect that we need to look at in online social networks - we don't simply place ourselves into the network, we place the network into us. It, of course, goes well beyond the "Top 8," but that is a clear and very visual example of our decreased singularity within these networks.

This concept also operates through the archival nature of our identities. I was so glad to hear Fred address this in his presentation. It's this idea that we are interacting in a very archival environment - where every interaction is recorded (or could be recorded) to the point that archivization is often the purpose of interaction - that drives identity within a networked world. What this conference could actually have been discussing is what happens to our selves when we interact within a globally networked, and largely accessible, archive. The social construction of identity only happens as a result of this reified archivization, the issue of identity from a business and software position is essentially an issue of how to enact control upon this system and our selves within the system.

Instead of going on a tangent about control in networked environments, I'll simply link to an older entry on this blog in which I react to Alex Galloway's (who also was in attendance, I hear) response to Deleuze's Postscript to Societies of Control.