I'm sorry this is so boring. But I'm having trouble making it readable without spilling too much of my private guts. This is b/c I don't put the time and energy (nor do I possess the innate talent) to write something interesting that isn't intensly personal. Isn't that what blog-culture cultivates - this sloppy-but-salacious confessional mode of writing? I don't have anything against others doing this (other than the fact that eventually I tire of reading about who you have a crush on), but after taking this "Technologies of Identity" class, which deals primarily w/ privacy policy & online surveillance, I'm done spilling my guts.
"That compartmentalization (of identity) is both necessitated and made difficult by the user’s ignorance of the online context in which he performs. One never knows who else is present and ready to catch the online wink. There is no ability to assess or manage the context of revelation."
The key is that we're performing social interactions online that we performed for millions of years in the real world. In the real world, we could get feedback about where this info was going and what it would be used for. And its life was as long as people's memories (not very long). Digital recording also freaks me out in this respect. The connection between this context management and having a stable, secure sense of who you are isn't something that you're conscious of, but that doesn't mean its not there. If you really stop and think about how much of your identity is a performance, and how much that performance is altered by positive/negative feedback, you start to realize how much context/feedback matter.
But I refuse to be one of those paranoid souls who won't get his digital picture taken, nor will he have anything to do w/ the internet. Tons of people have taken the plunge into this confessional blogging world. I just think that the technology is so new that no one has really found an effective, efficient way to take advantage of it and use it for large scale slanderous purposes, but it wouldn't be surprising if they did soon. The groundwork is there - all this shit that used to have context doesn't anymore. The dangers of this are so subtle and abstract; hard to tell if they're even there. The danger is less in getting arrested and more in a vague alienation of friends or potential employers. It'd be so hard to track or prove. But interesting to think about.
