Frances Bell’s Blog

Josie Frasers post on online identity really got me thinking yesterday.  Of course the point of her categories model is not whether or not it is ‘right’ but rather how it does or doesn’t help each of us think about our online identities and our lives.  There have been lots of interesting comments to Josie’s post but I am really responding to her model, as it certainly got me thinking.

As a member of a Business School, it’s in my job description to come up with at least one 2×2 matrix every 6 months so here is mine:

2x2 matrix of Online Identities

This idea sprang from my slight unease with the term personal, since I also see my professional identity as personal, so I used the term social but I can see that also leaks into professional. Social/ professional used to be called Home/work as places but these spill into each other as we ‘do’ each of social and professional almost everywhere.  The other dimension I have used is individual/group that seems particularly relevant to identity.

Josie raised the issues of privacy, data ownership/mobility, representation and voice.  My way of dealing with online identity is to assume that all is more or less public since it is so difficult to control the privacy of what we say and reveal in a connected world.  For example, on Facebook it is possible to exercise some control over what we reveal by being selective over friending and offering differentiated profiles but once we move into groups our utterances become public (since we can’t control who joins the group) and form our identity for those who may not have access to our profiles.  This is why I have shown our social identity as ‘expressed through’ our activities in a group that is of course entirely dependent on the expression of individuals.  Professional identities are increasingly public, as traditional CVs conflate with online identities that may be on a professional networking service such as Linkedin or on an organisational web site.  The benefits of using Linkedin for the individual professional identity or posting their CV on their own domain are the persistence and control of an individual identity - we don’t lose those profiles when we change jobs, as we do with, say, a university web page.  However the issues of ownership and mobility of data are relevant here.  Like many other web services that need a business model, it is a lot easier to find the ‘import contacts’ option on Linkedin than to export contacts, CV , etc. - look at the search for ‘export resume’ on Linkedin.  I have a blog at http://francesbell.com (an important component of my individual professional identity) and I know that has much better mobility than my Linkedin profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/francesbell, as long as I back it up and have the skills to move it. So as an individual, I can compare the risks of Linkedin ‘disappearing’ with me forgetting to backup + my hosting service ‘disappearing’.  My employer, and those ‘organisations’ with a Linkedin presence whom I cite in my profile can be seen to benefit from my having a Linkedin profile that links to them.  My voice is my own in each of those ‘identities’ but modulated by the context.

So my model helps me to think about the relationships between individual and group for social and professional identities (but doesn’t explore relationships between social and professional for individual and group - no room!!).  How about you? Is the challenge in the relationships rather than the identities?