Identity in Social Media

With one person having accounts all over the internet, all with little bits of information which define who we are to the people there, is identity thus distributed? Identity IRL is about memory and perception, but online memory is archived and perceptions are in bits and pieces. Even lifestreams only show us tiny bits of mostly disconnected ideas.

How about it? Do you feel like your identity is distributed or singular?

Just saw this post tweeted and thought that it raised some interesting questions.

1. Social technologies allow humans to interact without respect to locality in time or space. Someone can read and react to your post around the world and six months later, comment, and interact with others surrounding the post.
2. This means social technologies have allowed people to interact as they would without the limitations of locality, arguably the most pervasive limitation next to death we have.
3. Visualizations of the data-streams of social networks show tantalizing patterns. Nodes and lattices that seem to show up again and again.
4. If there are are mathematical functions that predict these data-streams, wouldn’t these functions also be describing how humans fundamentally want to interact?
5. Since most of the problems of society stem from living in ways we don’t want to, and since interaction is the majority of life, wouldn’t modeling our societies on these functions produce a working society?

Thoughts? Is social media and technology some sort of natural model of free human interactions?

Once, everyone lived in a village. Once, everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Secrets were hard to hold. The offset of that was the sense of community. To share the events of life, big and small, good and bad.

You shared because it was natural, but you also held back what you could, to reserve something for those closest to you. Levels of contact were formed, with close family groups, extended family groups, all linked to the community.

In Meditation 17, John Donne famously says “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”. A part of everything, of the village, of the community.

Donne was writing from a religious sense, but we can see the way that social networks are fulfilling that role from a technological sense.

There are multiple types of social networks now, and each type fulfills a need. There does not, as yet, seem to be a comprehensive solution.

There are microblogs, such as Twitter and Plurk and the ilk, with their immediacy and frequency of information of flow. Then there are the more detailed and comprehensive social sites such as Facebook and Myspace, giving people a presence, a home, online, to share updates and information on the events of their life, in a way previously reserved to bloggers. A permanent place to talk about their lives, connect on a more detailed level.

Most people seem to use a combination of at least one, if not many, microblog(s) and one or more comprehensive social tool(s).

As a result, communities are forming, of common interests. These transcend physical location, age, and social class. The usual limitations on society. These communities are rich, vibrant, and diverse. The disabled are no longer judged on the way their bodies are limited, those of wealth mix with those of lower socio economic circumstances. Ideas flow, information is shared.

Again, we are choosing to have our levels of sharing, with some people close, much more informed about our life, than others who may be acquaintances, or extended members of our circles.

News is flashed instantly, disasters and other major events are now being broken globally before news services have heard of anything.

The Internet was once a frontier town, way back ten years or more ago. When I first got online, you could feel the rough and ready nature, you were pioneers, pitching your grey-backgrounded, text based ‘tents’ (then came the white-backgrounded ‘tents’, images, including the much abused animated gif, and the dreaded ‘blink’ tag). social media

Now, our social networks are forming us into communities, and soon, towns. Later there will be cities. All the good and bad of that growth we bring with us, inherently, as humans. Yet this is a new way, a more egalitarian way. All you need is access to technology, and you can use these social networks to carve your place out.

Access itself is becoming much more available, as new mobile phones, ultraportables, and the rise of netbooks, are making our ability to link in to our networks immediate and frequent. The portal travels with us, now. We are no longer tied to our desk.

Truly, we are once more becoming ‘part of the main’. Where will that take us, what will our cities look like?