dale olds’ virtualsoul » Identity Implies Relationship
One of the most interesting things for me in working with notions of “identity” is how much overlap there is with other disciplines - especially philosophy. A few months ago there was a good discussion of how reputation fits into an identity system (I posted these on the topic -1, 2, 3 and 4) and Dale Olds’ comments are, I think, an extension of this. At heart of this is the question of what is identity. As Dale points out the lexicon is there to guide, but many of the terms used can have a different meaning in every day life and that just causes confusion (even within the Identity Gang itself!).
An identity can be seen as a set of attributes. What’s important here is that those attributes may, or may not be, publicly available (or published to put it another way). Whether any individual attribute is published in any context is completely independent of other contexts (in fact, I can see scenarios where the same attribute could be published with different values to different contexts). Expanding on what Dale says about identification being the act of distinguishing one object from another, leads us to the interesting thought that it’s the measurement of the attributes that creates an identity - in a digital sense my identity is created when I provide a username, email address, password etc. and an instance session of that identity is created when I use a combination of those attributes to identity and authenticate myself to a system. There’s an almost quantum effect going on and this is where the philosophy comes in…
To complicate matters is the fact that I can have multiple identity instances at once - a mixture of digital and “real”. Each of those instances is determined by the attributes that are published to a receiving party - without that party, the instance can never exist. I reveal a certain set of attributes to you, the reader, by writing this and yet other sets are revealed by interactions with other people - a phone conversation with my girlfriend gives one set, but a conversation in the same medium with a recruitment agent will reveal others. Much of this in the real world is subconscious, but in a digital world we can, in theory, have more control over how we show ourselves. The underlying base identity (with the master set of attributes) is the same in each case.
Each identity instance may be transient, or there may be some permanence, or at least some continuity between the times when that instance is invoked (a session). Sometimes I want to make sure that I can continue a conversation and establish a reputation - it serves me no good to present a new set of attributes to someone in that case, other times I can be sure that an instance of an identity presented will be temporary (a conversation on a plane, for instance) and I may never need that set of attributes again. Something to add to the confusion here is that all the time, as sentient beings, we’re aware of ourselves - we can observe and measure our own attributes, which then allows us to create identities based on those. However, as most of us are painfully aware, those attributes change over time - where I once had an identity with attributes of youthful and carefree, I may now be stressed, unhappy and ageing (as it happens, I’m not. I’ll leave comments about delusion and not noticing change in ourselves to psychologists!). The upshot of this is that although I may have a reputation attached to an external identity the underlying identity might not actually be the same! Bringing in a bit more philosophy and physics would suggest that we’re not the same person at any two moments in time since the atoms that comprise our bodies are themselves different!
As Dale points out, the whole point of an identity is to enable external relationships (which may involve reputation), whether digital, professional, financial or romantic. The challenge is to make sure that systems reflect our existing, natural experiences of identity - we have to be able to present ourselves in different ways for different audiences and make sure that we can keep a consistent identity to each over time - as well as using the language of such experiences in a familiar way so that everyone can participate in the discussion.
On this day..
- WS-Trust Video - 2006
- Windows CardSpace not hacked - 2006
