Featured, Society - Written Thursday, August 20, 2009 by Naumi Haque - 13 Comments

The digital identity divide

If you haven’t conducted this experiment yet, visit the MIT Personas project and type your name into the search field. What comes out is a visual representation of your digital self. As noted on the project page, “Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.”

Over the past year, we’ve been researching extensively the topic of digital identity. Not surprisingly, a lot of the theory we explore directly affects our day-to-day lives and how we interact online. As an example, I’m finding a growing “identity divide” as my various social graphs intersect (or more importantly don’t intersect) with my digital self. To put it bluntly, it’s becoming increasingly uncanny how my online persona—instead of converging—is in many ways actually diverging from the “real” me.

Why is this? One reason is that many of our most significant interactions—those with family and close friends—occur offline and are not captured as part of our digital identities. I think the bigger reason is that we’re constantly reminded that our digital identities are entities that need to be managed, so what does appear online tends to be a highly sanitized version of us. danah boyde talks extensively about the issue of digital identity. In her 2002 thesis paper “Faceted Id/entity: Managing Representation in a Digital World,” she says:

“In any given situation, an individual presents a face, which is the social presentation of one facet of their identity. I believe that an individual has a coherent sense of self, but in presenting only facets of their identity, they are perceived as fragmented. People maintain many different social facets and often associate particular facets, and therefore faces, with particular contexts.”

For knowledge workers like me, the vast majority of Internet use is work-related. In many ways, if you’re developing a professional online brand, the decision to cut out personal details is made for you. I could use Twitter and blogs to talk about how cute the baby is or to complain about how I was up all night working on a paper, but how would that contribute to my brand? Why does anyone care about what movie I saw on the weekend or who I’m cheering for in the playoffs? The general question is: What is the value of using the pubic Web as a venue to air personal issues?

Continue…