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Again, another quiet spell, but things have been happening that have kept me away from blogging. I should be able to post on this very shortly… 
I was recently re-reading Neal Stephenson’s “In the Beginning…Was the Command Line” (also available online for free) and I was struck by some of the comments that Stephenson makes during his essay and how they relate to the (even more) modern problems facing computer use, particularly in the Internet age.
The key point from the essay is about how the use of GUIs impacts on and impedes a lower level understanding of what’s really going on. Stephenson obviously deals with operating systems but makes an interesting point about how the metaphor of a GUI extends into other areas of the life; the levels of abstraction apply to television, books and other areas of culture. Stephenson uses the interesting story about Disney World as a pre-packaged interpretation of a real experience and it’s certainly one that rings true after a little thought.
“By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them.”
This particular quote struck with great resonance, thinking recently, as I had been about identity related issues from a non-technical angel and most interestingly from a psychology perspective. Twice in the past few weeks pub conversations have descended into questions of self image, presentation, reflection, multiple personae - questions, ultimately of “identity”. This was followed by a dinner conversation during which Erving Goffman’s theories on some of those matters were referenced (as you can tell I have a thrilling social life).
Ultimately, all our interactions are identity based - in a conversation the language, tone and vocabulary change according to the audience. The underlying identity doesn’t change, but the presentation of that will vary (there’s been some interesting research recently about how in fact, people do change according to who they surround themselves with however). One of the goals of digital identity management is? to make our online interactions as seamless and natural as our face to face ones.
This leaves me wondering - I do tend to agree with Stephenson’s quote above about how, when we abstract something with metaphors, the underlying concepts become more difficult to understand. There’s been discussion in the past about how impersonation and delegation fit into the identity model and I’m starting to question how we can best use such concepts within a solid identity system.
Identity federation systems provide a level of abstraction that reduces the amount of control that individual users have - the “user centric” model is there to redress that for the consumer space (in the enterprise space any identity is owned by the employer and not the employee), but even there the goal is to reduce the complexity that the user sees - providing a GUI over the command line of the underlying system.
Whilst making systems easier to use, providing metaphors and interoperability layers we need to ensure that the people at both ends of an identity transaction can determine what happens throughout.
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