Digital We: A (Multiple) Identity Crisis

Intentionally or not, the world of bits offers so many opportunities to create information related to ourselves, and for that information to coalesce into something like an identity, that even the most transparent and consistent Net denizens appears in multiple forms in multiple locations. You might say that we’re all suffering from a form of digital schizophrenia.

Yet according to a number of our ideators, the ways in which we coordinate our digital personae is about to change.

“I think most people have always managed their identities in separate silos,” says venture capitalist Christine Herron. “This is me in the real world, this is me on Facebook, this is me at work, and this is me on Twitter, with a little bit of overlap.” But Herron thinks that world is coming to an end. “Folks have had some belief, which I think is little incorrect, that they could keep those things separate.” Instead, she believes we’re moving into an era where our multiple identities will inevitably bleed together.

“I think most people have always managed their identities in separate silos...Folks have had some belief, which I think is little incorrect, that they could keep those things separate.” - Christine Herron, First Round Capital

One Identity to Rule Them All?

Ideator Charlene Li agrees. Li is a former leading analyst for Forrester Research, where she focused on weighty issues like the ramifications of online identity for corporations and individuals. She says that our multiple identities will be melded into one, giving us much more control over how others interact with us. “You can choose how people will want to get connected to you,” she says. “I can choose for them to email me, text me; Twitter me, whichever way it goes. It will all be very much connected together – and under my control.”

Li maintains this will happen in large part because we’ll be using a single mobile device that will mediate all our digital presences – perhaps the ultimate kind of convergence. Communications guru Dewayne Hendricks concurs, and adds that that uber-intelligent device will in turn mediate much of our interaction with the rest of the digital world.

My Own Private Persona

Privacy and its opaque cousin, anonymity, have been considered by many to be crucial components of Internet identity. The more information that’s available about us, the thinking goes, the more potential for the abuse of that information. The more identities we have on the Internet that can be tied to sensitive data, the more likely it is that someone with bad intentions can use that data.

Yet investor Herron believes we’re seeing a radical disappearance of privacy, driven in large part by the appearance of new “deep Web searching” services that scrape every possible information source, and aggregate the information together to build a digital picture of us. Sites like pipl and Spock can provide an almost frightening ability to pull from places we may not have even known had information about us.

“I can choose for them to email me, text me; Twitter me, whichever way it goes. It will all be very much connected together – and under my control.” - Charlene Li, Social Media Expert

A number of our ideators offer perspectives on other issues that will affect our multiple identities. Both Tim Brown of IDEO and industry observer Doc Searls believe we’re going to shift from acting as consumers to participants in our relationships as customers. That changing dynamic would not only mean we’d be more in the driver’s seat: As we’re required to exert more responsibility than simply buying a product, we’ll occupy different identities in relationship to our vendors and each other.

(Multiple) Identity Shift

John Jordan, author of the popular “Early Indications” newsletter, thinks we’ll integrate these identities through some form of federated identity, where Internet-based servers will coordinate with each other to determine who we are in different contexts. Investor Herron posits a somewhat different approach, where we’ll be part of the process of tagging ourselves and our friends to allow systems to better determine how we want our identities to be understood and managed.

No matter the mechanism, it’s clear that the advent of social networking has opened a new era of identity, simultaneously allowing us to create new “digital we’s” and offering ways to synchronize our multiple online presences. In the end, it’s probably not so much an arms race, as it is a continuous digital dance of information about us, and new tools for integrating online what's already integrated offline - ourselves.