#SoL15 Day 10: Digital Identities and Slicing

…but I enjoyed the long nap, needed one and hope it restored if not my work/life balance then at least my sleep/life balance. Yesterday, I got a flash about what wanted to reminisce on next but already forgot what it was.

Two others, both writing/blogging related and reflections on the now -- connected too, hung around: identities and slicing. That would be digital identity or identities -- throwing social media into the mix. Although neither bot nor digital puppeteer with a string of sock puppets, I have more than a few of those. I am hardly alone in this practice. Some are personae and others are entities -- organizations or projects -- I represent or handle social media on behalf of. Some manage with just the same identity across multiple streams and platforms. The boundaries between mine are more porous than they used to be -- OK for personae to mingle, tricky for the other.

Digital identity

...is the data that uniquely describes a person or a thing and contains information about the subject's relationships.^[1] The social identity that an internet user establishes through digital identities in cyberspace is referred to as online identity. A critical problem in cyberspace is knowing with whom one is interacting. Currently there are no ways to precisely determine the identity of a person in digital space. Even though there are attributes associated to a person's digital identity, these attributes or even identities can be changed, masked or dumped and new ones created. Despite the fact that there are many authentication systems and digital identifiers that try to address these problems, there is still a need for a unified and verified identification system. Thus, there are issues of privacy and security related to digital identity.

With no "ways to determine digital identity," how do we even know who we are, let alone others? My reply goes to slicing and digital conversation: by how we write ourselves for ourselves (not the audience or market) -- and by our exchanges/conversations with others. Digital,ly "I/Thou" still applies

Here's another, still social but more economics oriented, digital identity link.

Digital Identities ©Julia Forsythe

My all time favorite digital identity post is still Bonnie Stewart's "Digital Identities: Six Key Selves of Networked Publics," from#change11. It was/still is central to my "identity integration" (more gravitas than "who am I anyway?") project. I never completed the assignment (or, from another perspective, am still working on it) and am still processing how the key selves (for one identity) fit it with multiples.

Digital Identities as Affordances of Social Media: Who are We in a Networked Public?

This week’s discussion bridges from and builds on last week’s topic, facilitated by George Veletsianos. Like George’s work, mine focuses on practices and participation and how these function. George, however, looks specifically at scholars: my interest is in the broader concept of identity and how we are shaped by our digital practices. 

George’s work is premised in looking at what Selwyn & Grant call the “state of the actual;” my work straddles both actuality and potentiality.  I am interested in what we do that makes us who we are in social media spaces, thus my concept of digital identity is practice-based. At the same time, I see identity as a lens through which we can examine the potentialities specific to social networks. I use the concept of identity to explore what it is that social software makes possible in practice.

My short take on affordances is "what can we do with them?" Social media and cyberspace make multiple identities possible.

Where does the slicing come in?

Another short take: I need a place to write myself, write to remember/remind myself who I am. Not Precarious Faculty or its adjunctiverse antecedent, none of the online voices of Mountainair NM, not National Mobilization for Equity, not a manifestation of National Adjunct, not Poets & Writers Picnic. Who/what did I leave out?



 I am participating in the March Slice of Life Challenge: blogging a slice a day for all of March.  Thank you, Two Writing Teachers! Visit the site to read some slices