One of the women coming to She's Geeky pointed me to this article that she wrote about Digital Tatoo's. I think it is a good metaphor for all the stuff we put out there online particularly when we are younger. Interestingly although I was "on" the internet from 1995 when I started college I never had any web presence until 2001 when I did my first ever public talk that ended up on the web. By then I was ready for my web identity to be formed but up until then I was quite conscious of not talking in any public forums or posting things online.
It is a good read and highlights where her thinking went after reading Clay Shriky's Gin, Television and Social Surplus (I haven't read it I heard him talk about it on a podcast).
On a more serious note, the generation coming up now is the first one to have the ability to publicly record whatever they feel like recording. While this is wonderful, it also gives me pause. This upcoming generation will be the first to cut it’s teeth on this issue and frankly I don’t envy them. There are a few things (aw come on, we all have ‘em) that I might have written about, or been passionate about at 18 that I might not want publicly available at 35, or 50. Much of our growth as people and thinkers comes from trying out new ideas and making some mistakes. For most of us, this growth is preserved only in the memories of those close to us, or in letters, and diaries boxed up in the garage. What we publish digitally though is again like a tattoo, it sticks around, publicly, forever. There is a reason most of us are discouraged from getting tattoos until we reach adulthood. The tattoo of our favorite cartoon character might have been awesome at 19, but not so awesome later.
I hope that the web encourages a plethora of public thought and expression. It also behooves us to have an awareness of the public nature and longevity of what we put out there lest we are left with the digital equivalent of that tattoo we thought we wanted, but didn't.
Related posts:
Unconference.net
Hi Kaliya,
One of the problems is that "to publish" in this web 2.0 world means "to submit information to a third party persona broker". However, the web doesn't have to be about web 2.0 services which mediate our online transactions. We need to unlock the power of our edge devices to exchange information directly with others - which has the byproduct of being able to withdraw information from publication (although any previously published information which had been retrieved cannot be un-known - save for DRM 'protected' information).
In this vein, I’d like to draw your attention to Glynx (www.glynx.com) a p2p platform for social communication that, like identity cards, provides privacy and control over your online identities. However, with Glynx, your personal information stays on your PC and no server has visibility of your personas or relationships.
Glynx also suppotrs OpenID and, because it runs out-of-band to the web session, it too is immune to various sorts of exploitation and phishing.
Specifically Glynx runs on your PC and provides:
• A unique patented peer-to-peer directory for private search, discovery, and relationship building – and the ability to share changing identity information in real-time to selected others without making it available to SPAMmers, service providers or any other third party, including websites.
• A PKI-based trust environment enabling Glynx participants to have confidence in the identity of those with whom they interact.
• A pluggable identity synchronization engine and application framework which connects online sources of identity information and enables personal information to be organized into personas and shared with selected audiences...
Glynx is still in beta and isn't quite ready for prime-time yet. But we're looking for early feedback - on our concepts particularly, if not our implementation.
I hope I've sparked your interest and you feel moved to check out our website or the article at http://glynx.com/blog/2008/09/16/the-glynx-approach---part-2-the-online-identity-crisis for more information.
Thanks for your time,
regards,
Greg Rolan
CTO Glynx