maybe you’ve posted your photo in any one of the services you consume in the web, maybe a blog, a twitter, a flickr, a you tube, anything that supports users uploading photos. but this is just your photo.

what about the separate things that make up your identity? your interests, working history, your creative side, your thoughts, your real and/or digital friends, your role models, anything and everything you can think of, including the small and seemingly uninteresting things you’ve done in the web. all this data could already be out there, even if under different aliases/usernames.

but think about it in today’s web:

• your friends: hi5.com, facebook.com, myspace.com (there are standards emerging for machine-readable descriptions of relations between people: xfn for example)
• your interests: same as above, lastfm
• employment history: linkedin
• your creative side: maybe a blog, a blog in myspace, a vlog, a photoblog, flickr, youtube
• your contact info: linkedin, plaxo, every other app out there
• your click and search history: google’s web history, hooeey
• a lifestream is a collection in one centralized place of everything you do on the web, a centralized me of sorts on the web; think you can have the photos you post on flickr, the songs you listen to in lastfm, the videos you post on youtube, the posts on your blog, your messages on twitter, the items you mark in google reader or digg, in your lifestream. Several sites enable you to build your own lifestream like friend feed, lifestream.fm (see an example here )
• A lifestream can be used to generate an attention profile. APML is becoming a standard for saving a user’s interests to display more relevant information in the future to that user. It can use browser history, im messages, email, documents, favorite artists (favorite anything really) and potentially everything you do on the web. From the source: “APML is a proposed standard that gives you greater control over your own attention data, and in principle will allow you to selectively record your attention profile - the sites you visit, the search terms that interest you most, the content you most commonly link to - and share it with your favorite websites and services”. Several sites already allow the import and export of your apml profile (eg. digg, clutzr) and even more use the concept (eg. lastfm and amazon are live examples) to display information relevant to you.
  In a few years most sites will do this due to the information overload we are living in. This information about you can then be used to help and/or manipulate you more efficiently

Now, this information may be put in machine-readable formats like microformats or not. Be it as it may, the exponential growth in computer processing power may allow for a collection and analysis of your breadcrumbs all over the web in one single unified place. You’ll have a pretty complete picture of who you are on the web if anyone bothers to investigate.

It can be a marketing glee, yes. At the same time it means that the information you receive will be more relevant to you. Either way, the potential is enormous. The more machines know about us, the more useful they can be.

These unified/disparate breadcrumbs around the web form a digital identity. Something you may or may not think much about but it is You, much like what you do, say, write, in everyday life forms the core of your social identity.

No other medium in history has put the concept of social identity in such a centerplace.

So what is social identity?

Social identity according to Henri Tajfel and John Turner (1979) is composed of four elements (source:):

• Categorization: We often put others (and ourselves) into categories. Labeling someone a Muslim, a Turk, or a soccer player are ways of saying other things about these people.
• Identification: We also associate with certain groups (our ingroups), which serves to bolster our self-esteem.
• Comparison: We compare our groups with other groups, seeing a favorable bias toward the group to which we belong.
• Psychological Distinctiveness: We desire our identity to be both distinct from and positively compared with other groups.

source

In the Social Identity Theory, a person has not one, “personal self”, but rather several selves that correspond to widening circles of group membership. Different social contexts may trigger an individual to think, feel and act on basis of his personal, family or national “level of self” (Turner et al, 1987). Apart from the “level of self”, an individual has multiple “social identities”. Social identity is the individual’s self-concept derived from perceived membership of social groups (Hogg & Vaughan, 2002). In other words, it is an individual-based perception of what defines the “us” associated with any internalized group membership. This can be distinguished from the notion of personal identity which refers to self-knowledge that derives from the individual’s unique attributes.
(source)

What about identity itself?

[...] rests upon a distinction among the psychological sense of continuity, known as the ego identity (sometimes identified simply as “the self”); the personal idiosyncrasies that separate one person from the next, known as the personal identity; and the collection of social roles that a person might play, known as either the social identity or the cultural identity.
[...] This paradigm focuses upon the twin concepts of exploration and commitment. The central idea is that any individual’s sense of identity is determined in large part by the explorations and commitments that he or she makes regarding certain personal and social traits. It follows that the core of the research in this paradigm investigates the degrees to which a person has made certain explorations, and the degree to which he or she displays a commitment to those explorations.
(source)

I’ll repeat :

• “Social identity is the individual’s self-concept derived from perceived membership of social groups”
• “any individual’s sense of identity is determined in large part by the explorations and commitments that he or she makes regarding certain personal and social traits”

The web allows access to a wider range of people and so of possible Categorizations (see above) . This means that i can form an attraction and/or repulsion to a wider range of social groups, enriching the sense of who i am. It also allows us to play, to augment certain parts of our identity in one digital identity and other parts in another digital identity. This can be done with lesser risks than what was previously possible in history. It algo gives us the means to learn the knowledge required by these new roles, ie. i can learn to code, i can investigate philosopy, psychology, etc, every and any other concept is available for me and will be with ever increasing information in the next years.

These explorations in the web will of course leave a trace: your digital identity made up of your web history potentially accessible at any moment in time to anyone. Potentially because from the moment you sign up to an application you implicitly trust it won’t misuse the information you provide during the use of that application. It is an act of trust because in the end you really have little control over it (do things really get deleted or just hidden from the user for later analysis? etc).

This is important because the presence of a digital identity(ies) will become an everyday experience for everyone. It will afect the way you see yourself (the experiences you have online can have impact), your hiring potential (this happens already in some areas of expertise), the people you meet, the people you identify with and the people you don’t identify with. It will affect our lives in ways we cannot now imagine how. We might have universal access to everyone’s identity (past and present) in the future. By this i mean that if i want to find out who x is, i google him, search him up in hi5, facebook, etc. Each breadcrumb i find will help me form an image of who that person is now, even if he wrote x 5 years ago. And it stands to reason that the information available about x will be richer in a few years than it is today. The impact this will have on everyone of us individually and on and the social relations we form is unknown.

To resume

• The web industry is moving more and more to the sharing and relating of previous disperse information. This is a good thing but it poses questions (whether or not this is being done with an attention to privacy - which it is)
• We have the ability to try out more identies than was previously possible
• We have access to information that supports the construction of those identities
• We have acccess to people that support the construction of those identities and so the system is of infinite richness
• We have to deal with the impact those identities have on us and on the way others perceive us
• We have to deal with the lasting impact those identities have on us and on the way others perceive us, ie. what you do on the web is potentially forever there meaning you may not be able to delete it or prevent others from seeing it

Food for thought