Thanks to a blog post I’ve ran across – totally by accident, through the route of “six degrees” – I read about Issac Kelly’s thoughts on blog commenting, and he mentions Disqus which utilizes OpenID.
I’d like to pause, for a moment, and thank the developers of mozilla firefox for their creation of tabs (or, I should say, the popularity of tabs). I would not be able to organize my digital life nearly as well.
Back to our commentary
I dig how a lot of the “bigger blogs” (read: lifehacker, boingboing, consumerist) add threaded comments, and blogs/sites are integrating OpenID. One stop shopping, right? At the same time, I find it amusing that people want to associate their online life with all they do – yet at the same time, we have people clamoring for their privacy. They want to have it be easy to use every web service, have total anonymity, but also only want one user name and password!
In this age where our government is able to snoop our emails, phone calls, IMs, ISP transfers – do we want one ID?
Now, of course, there are two groups – the people that say “If you have nothing to hide, you should have no problem” and the people who say “I shouldn’t have to worry about what I may have or have not done.”
Ben Franklin put it best:
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
But in this digital age, that’s somewhat difficult to do – we’re tracked by our actions, our search terms, our blog posts, our IP address – some blogs are banning anonymous replies – forcing an email address, at least (yet one MORE thing that ties us down!). During Ben Franklin’s days, he was able to create a myriad of identities to suit his needs – his public face was different from the personas he created for political/financial gain. He had anonymity. He could claim that the letter printed were mailed to him, dropped off, or spoken directly – and who could claim else wise?
Nowadays – you can google. Google your name, an email address, a screen name, an IP address. You’ll get postings, you’ll get history, you’ll get names, addresses, friends, family – a truckload of information. So what can we do to combat this? Is this even a battle at all? This of course relates back – do you have anything to hide? I’m interested in how politics will play out in the next five years (ten? twenty?) – “We have proof that the candidate was googling ‘how to kill your husband.’” – and the reply “I was googling that for a short-story I was writing at the time.” “Well, what about your searches for ‘lesbian porno’?” “That would be my husband, thank-you-very-much.”
The future of the net is changing – as is our idea of “identity” – virtual or otherwise.
The old tricks we used to play to skirt around, will die. New ones will arise – “fake” email addresses can be generated. You’re a point-click away from creating a fake identity. Of course, businesses aren’t so lucky – they get busted editing their own wikipedia entry. At the same time, celebrities are branded – by the news, by their own blog postings. Internet celebrities are no different. You’re called out for your mistakes, your mis-givings, your typos.
What’s my opinion? I’m not a celebrity. I don’t know if I’d ever be in a political position to worry about someone trying to google my deep, dark history of multiple identities, lives, and flip-flopping of political positions (We have a blog post stating Catholic values, yet he claims buddhism! He’s a flip-flopper!). I, of course, won’t stop studying this phenomenon, this future of our digital lives. It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out…
