Nature has a way of reminding us how small we are. Although humanity has come a long way in taming Mother Earth and bending her to our will, there are still events that are beyond our ability to control. While our ability to stop heat waves and earthquakes from occurring has remained non-existent throughout history, our capacity for communication and sharing those affecting lived experiences with others has grown considerably over time.

A pair of natural events that have swept through certain affected communities of users over the past two days on the trendy social media services Foursquare and Twitter that brought to mind some thoughts about the value of shared lived experiences and suggested some strategies for developing man-made events that are similarly affecting.

First, a record heat wave has stricken America’s North-East, with the mercury surpassing 103 degrees in New York City on Tuesday. This uncomfortable weather condition has been keenly felt on NYC-based location-based service Foursquare, which has seen more than 4,500 users check-in to a ‘location’ that was created for the heat wave called Heatpocalypse. I don’t know who created the venue, but it has accumulated dozens of tips and tags over the past two days and prompted some of the increasingly more common Super Swarms (events where over 250 users have checked-in to the same venue in a given time period) that mark a large scale (for Foursquare, anyways) shared lived experience, whether that is a sporting event, a music festival or a political rally.

In the second event, a moderate earthquake rocked Southern California this evening towards the end of the work day, and many Twitter users (including its increasing celebrity population) immediately took to the status update service to spread the news of the tectonic event. Social media analytics service Rowfeeder posted that it had recorded over 60,000 relevant updates in the hours following the earthquake, and I tweeted shortly after the event that this kind of response has been commonly observed throughout Twitter’s history – I have even dug up an old post from a student discussion forum at the LSE on the subject back in 2007.

So what do these two events reveal about affecting lived experiences? It seems to suggest that when there are events of a large scope and specifically understood meaning that affects the lives of many, those who are affected have a tendency to share their experience through whatever means are available to them. The motivations for such sharing may vary across a number of factors, but what is common is that an impulse to share was elicited by the event. In my graduate research I tended to focus on the theory of identity performance as the motivation for sharing lived experiences through social media, however there are many other motivations to share information (including, for example, reassuring your friends and family that you haven’t died in a natural disaster).

Still, when it comes to trying to harness Super Swarms for your business or associating your brand with the immense outbursts of tweets related to a beloved international sporting event, I would suspect that mere mortals will find identity performance (users electing to associate themselves with a known cultural object) to be the most fruitful motivation for eliciting the impulsive response tendency of an affecting lived experience – that is, unless you’ve got an earthquake machine on your approved vendors list.

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Filed under: Digitization, Identity
Posted by: Richard
On: Thursday, July 8th

All that you do
All that you say.
All that you eat
And everyone you meet
All that you slight
And everyone you fight.
All that is now
All that is gone
All that’s to come
and everything under the sun

-”Eclipse“, from Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

What defines your individuality on the network? Is it the things that you do, the things that you say and the people that you interact with, as well as the things that you have done in the past and those that you will do in the future? How does one individuate themselves on the network, and what are the costs and benefits of this kind of identification? I would argue that an individual’s characteristics and actions are indeed important components of their identity, and that they are being increasingly tracked and analyzed across an ever-growing number of vectors.

Increasing amounts of data are being collected and mined for insights into each individual identity, searching for ways that it can be leveraged to improve the efficiency of services delivered according to the specific characteristics of a given individual. This may range from the use of genetic profiling in an effort to personalize a medical treatment regimen, to building a purchasing history database at the super market with a loyalty program that offers discounts to members. In these systems, individuality is defined by both the given characteristics of an individual (their genes, their average checkout ticket value), and the actions that they undertake which differentiate one patient or consumer from another (reacting to a discovery of susceptibility to a form of cancer, buying private label or premium brands).

As adoption of the network has grown, the use of these types of knowledge systems have broken out from the realm of business and regulatory regimes and become increasingly common attributes of mainstream consumer web applications. For instance, Amazon’s recommendation engine is familiar to most users of the e-commerce site, and the internet radio service Pandora grew out of the Music Genome Project which seeks to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” by labeling artists, songs and albums with any number among hundreds of qualities that are construed to circumscribe the universe of possible musical ‘genes’. Apple’s iTunes Genius software works in much the same way, and in both cases the ‘individuality’ of each user can be reduced to their characteristics (the musical tastes that they input into the system) and their actions (their critical response to songs that Pandora and Genius deduce the individual should like, according to the algorithm).

Social Network Sites like Facebook have considerably widened the field of individuation of your network identity over more specialized services like Amazon or Pandora. On Facebook your individuality is determined by the characteristics that you enter into the system (your favorite bands, your profile picture, your networks) and especially the actions you take within the network: the friends you request and accept, the fan pages you follow, the status updates you post, the links that you share. All of these characteristics and actions individuate you on the network, and secure your identity as unique, as different than others (indeed, different than the twelve other people on the network who share your name, but not your identity). They are also increasingly public.

So, what’s new about this? Identity and reputation have always been defined by given characteristics and a track-record of actions taken. Perhaps what is new is the shelf-life of those actions, and the granularity with which individuals can be differentiated thanks to information technology. If all of the siloed and separated stores of an individual’s network identity were to be pooled and integrated, which is what it appears that Facebook Connect and other projects aim to accomplish, then an individual’s network identity could persist across every service under the sun.

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Filed under: Identity, Network Society
Posted by: Richard
On: Monday, August 24th

As we’ve seen over the length of this year, the digitization of media has empowered individuals to communicate with the world. As sources of information have increased, a struggle for relevance and credibility has ensued with many venerable institutions falling victim to upstarts, usurpers, and the rest of the crowd who are now able to reach a mass audience cheaply and easily.

In this network of identity and reputation, old standards of operation are becoming obsolete. The institution of journalism, perhaps justly proud of its self-styled public watchdog role, nonetheless has long observed various rules of conduct that are not strictly in the public interest. The era of the mainstream media being able to conspire to smother a story is rapidly drawing to a close as digital sources of information gain credibility.

A crucial source of that new-found credibility is the increasing occurrence of peer groups and social networks sharing information with each other digitally. Through the attribution of identity, the distribution of information through social networks and other referral mechanisms gains a specific, and personal, context. In this system, users are both publishers and brokers of information, and the ideas, updates or stories that are being shared can pass freely throughout their network with their imprint.

In many ways, this is nothing new. Individuals have always shared information with each other, and people’s identities have certainly been bound up with the sort of information they may have had to share. Personal relationships have meant a lot in getting a message distributed, and they will become ever more important now as the scope of possible relationships increases. The number of people who can influence a large crowd is no longer limited to a relatively tiny percentage of journalists and public figures. Institutions attempting to navigate the social waters will have to bear this in mind when charting their course.

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Filed under: Digitization, Identity
Posted by: Richard
On: Wednesday, July 15th

I’ve been blogging about the internet for a while, and using it for far longer. Born in a region that lies at the heart of web innovation, I was exposed to the network early on in my life and that no doubt has influenced my outlook on this process of digitization that I see sweeping the globe. Obviously I am not the only one who has observed this, and I have been strongly influenced by people like William Gibson, Donna Haraway, Manuel Castells, Richard Stallman, danah boyd, Shigeru Miyamoto and Howard Rheingold, among many others.

Nevertheless, as a longtime internet user, I believe that there are more signs now than ever before that the increasing adoption of the internet as a crucial tool in the everyday lives of Americans has reached a tipping point. Yes, Americans have been on the net for well over a decade,  but I would argue that users have demonstrated a new depth of participation with the web this year. Just since the beginning of 2009 we have seen an audience of millions watching online video streams of the Obama inauguration, a massive institutionalization of so-called ‘citizen journalism’ during the #IranElection, and a sudden demonstration of how the influence of and affinity for a cultural icon like Michael Jackson can translate into a quantifiable asset.

The key to this growth, and the value proposition that it contains, are connected to the complimentary nature of the emergent network identity that now cuts across many demographics. While there was a time when nobody on the internet knew you were a dog, now identity is increasingly associated with the web experience. Because the web is becoming a part of American’s everyday lives, users will expect to be able to interact with the brands, products and companies that impact their lives on it, and when they are unhappy with that experience they will be able to make their displeasure known to the members of their social network.

Mine was an early introduction to the virtual lifestyle of the internet, but the generation being born today is more likely to have a network identity from the cradle to the grave. In this new environment, the challenges and opportunities now facing industry are to be able to satisfy that customer expectation for interaction while benefiting from the increased intelligence on, and exposure to, those customers through the network.

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Filed under: Digitization, Identity
Posted by: Richard
On: Wednesday, July 8th

The race is on to become the most valued and credible network identity guarantor on the net, and the stakes are high. If a company can serve as a trusted validator of user identity online, then they will be in a key position to negotiate and benefit from that user’s internet experience.

Witness Facebook Connect, which allows Facebook users to log into sites like the Huffington Post, Citysearch and USA Today without establishing new, separate accounts with each. The sites rely on Facebook to provide an identity management system for their users (who are also among Facebook’s 200 million users), and implicitly recognize the authenticity of Facebook’s profiles. The recent announcement of Pay with Facebook suggests how Facebook can further leverage its credibility as an identity broker to interpolate itself into a user’s web experience.

Yahoo has been flexing its muscles recently as well. The portal posted some pretty astounding traffic following the news of Michael Jackson’s heart attack (providing a useful reminder that although the company is often the butt of jokes in the tech world, when it comes to serving users it is no lightweight), and in its ongoing re-branding strategy the company has reportedly been emphasizing the site as “your home on the web”, although questions remain as to whether Yahoo’s users consider it as such.

Google is also interested in providing the services of identity brokers. With a Google account users can access numerous products, from Picasa and YouTube to Docs, GTalk and Google Checkout. Each of these accepts the same Google login, and of course GMail can be used as a credential for innumerable sites that require an email address for registration.

In each of these cases, we are faced with a proposed fix to an essential conundrum of the internet: that users cannot be trusted to be who they say they are. Each of these institutions seeks – by its size, reputation and database – to be able to declare authoritatively that they can certify that a web user is who they say they are. Whether there will be room for multiple brokers, or if one will win out over the others, remains to be seen. Whatever authority emerges, however, we can expect an increasingly prevalent network identity that remains the same across different platforms and services, and a general intolerance to serve those who insist on an anonymous internet.

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Filed under: Identity
Posted by: Richard
On: Tuesday, June 30th

One of the key processes that I failed to touch upon in that manifesto I dreamt up last week was globalization. The process of globalization has been an ongoing human effort for thousands of years – I just a few short weeks ago found myself standing at the Jade Gate in China’s Gansu province, which marked the limit of the Emperor’s (天子) territory. This facility marked a significant node of global trade at the time, and two of the branches of the Silk Route entered China through this gate bringing with it wares from Anatolia, Arabia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Persia, India and even Europe. It was also a cultural node as well, bringing together the merchants, traders and officials who gathered in the area to profit from the commerce that globalization had encouraged. The nearby Mogao Caves reflect the cultural capital (.pdf) accrued by powerful merchants who sponsored elaborate statues and frescoes in the contemporary Buddhist style.

Today airplanes have replaced camel trains, and the airport is the new Jade Gate that connects across distance and between culture. Functioning as a crucial node in the global network, airports present both an enticing business opportunity and an enormous management responsibility. It feels ordinary today to go to the airport and travel thousands of kilometers to a distant destination in a single day. This is definitely a contemporary attitude, as travel used to be incredibly time consuming. Distance used to be something that you measured in time – the time that it took one to travel a given distance. For instance in the 19th century It took settlers five to six months to follow the length of the Oregon Trail to the West Coast, and in 1912 the Titanic was in the midst of a five day journey to cross the Atlantic. Thanks the greater speeds enabled by airplane propeller (and later jet) engines we can cross the same distance in just a handful of hours.

When travelers reach their distant destination, they first enter the liminal zone of the airport. As a node in the global transportation network, airports are venues that stand in-between the place that you departed from and the place that you are traveling to. Experience tells us that airports do not tend to take advantage of this privileged position to build their own identity, and If you think about all of the airports that you have been in over your lifetime chances are most of them had similar features arranged in a typical style. This space of the airport terminal itself is an example of what Marc Auge calls a ‘non-place’ – a location from which cultural context and identity are largely stripped as a consequence of their transient nature.  This can be soothing – if a little boring – because of the volume of different kinds of people that transit airports, all of whose needs must be served by the same space. This has led to a general homogenization of airport terminal layouts and design around the world to make the ‘non-place’ of the airport surprisingly familiar, if unspecific to its geographic location.

So here is the conundrum: airports must be functional above all other considerations – their value is primarily tied to their ability to connect travelers and cargo with the global aviation network. And yet, as a consequence of this effort to serve functionality, airports have largely neglected developing an individual identity that reflects the geographical and social circumstances surrounding them. If international airports are modern-day Jade Gates, then they are too often lacking in their demonstrations of institutional cultural capital; they do not have their own Mogao Caves.

Without sacrificing essential functionality, airports should be striving to develop individuality instead of sameness in their terminal experience, and distinguishing themselves from both regional and international competitors through performances of their fitness as essentian nodes of the network and their socio-cultural significance as the facilitator of contemporary global consumer lifestyles. By developing and propagating a stronger institutional identity, airports will be able to tap into the potent strengths that are inherent to their essential function in the global market, and assume a singular character as among the most meaningful places of contemporary life, rather than an abstract ‘non-place’ connecting to other ‘non-places’ in the network.

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Filed under: Globalization, Identity, Network Society
Posted by: Richard
On: Thursday, June 11th

As consumers have invested more and more time and effort into developing their social networks online, they find that their identity is increasingly tied to their virtual presence on commercial sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Yelp. Where previously one may have set up their own website, or at least fumbled around on GeoCities (RIP), users now increasingly rely on services like Facebook or GMail to act as their ‘home base’ for identity management online. The self-created personal website may be becoming a rarity, replaced by the commercial social network profile page.

Facebook today announced that it would enable users to claim ‘vanity URLs’ that simplify the address of their profile page (for instance, my address could go from http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=34600004 to http://facebook.com/richard.nevins). They are opening the gates for username registration at 12am EST, June 13th and putting the presumably valuable URL’s up in a first-come first-serve basis that is bound to attract the social media equivalent of cyber-squatters (Twitter has seen its share of ‘name squatting‘). Customers in the land grab can choose one username that will remain with their account from that point on (according to FB it cannot be changed, so choose wisely).

While it might be easy to see why people would prefer a vanity URL to the incoherent numeral URLs of the present, there are compelling reasons to balk at this move by Facebook when it comes to identity management. As Marshall Kirkpatrick summarizes: “I don’t need a Facebook vanity URL because I already own MarshallK.com.” While I would echo Kirkpatrick’s suggestion that users should prefer the greater control over their digital identity that operating their own website provides, I suspect that it is one that appeals to fewer and fewer new ‘net users, who are now accustomed to user-friendly pre-fab solutions that require less cost and effort to set up and maintain. They are more likely to prefer to outsource the hosting of their web ‘home base’ (the principle source of their network identity) to a third party like Facebook or even Google.

I see this as a part of the broader trend of removing computing power and applications from local control and sending them off into the cloud. What was once the ‘Personal Computer’ is increasingly becoming the ‘Remote Computer,’ excelling at accessing offshore resources, applications and personal data that is no longer located on your person. The problem with putting all of your data in the cloud is that when you cannot access the cloud, you are cut off from your data. Then you’ve really lost control of your network identity!

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Filed under: Identity
Posted by: Richard
On: Wednesday, June 10th