Presentation of self on the web .. part 2 Friday, December 21, 2007

I've thought a bit more about presentation of self and identity on the web, and it feels as though there are two quite separate dimensions at play in the different ways that we explore and express our identities.

What got me thinking about this was something that emerged in the conversation with Andy. We were talking about tag clouds as being amenable to "thin-slice" type processing, where a single glance enables you to learn something useful about the person or entity that the tag cloud represents. And I was struck at the contrast between that short glance at a tag cloud and at the fact that a tag cloud could easily be representing repeated tagging activities that span several years.

So first of all, there's a distinction between presentations that are basically "one off" activities - such as filling in an online questionnaire and then displaying the resulting badge, or noting down your favourite movies or songs in your Facebook profile. Yes, of course you could go back and edit things, but the basic activity can be completed in a single session.

This is really different from a tag cloud, which evolves over time and doesn't have too much of interest in it until you've added quite a large number of separate tags. A tag cloud really only exists over evolutionary time.

And the second distinction that interests me here is the one between presentations that I have complete control over - such as my list of favourite movies - as opposed to presentations that emerge from the activities I carry out within the system, and where I could be surprised, or even disappointed, by what results. A tag cloud would be an example of this emergent kind of identity artefact. I could look at it and be surprised that, for example, poetry didn't really feature at all in the tags I had recorded.

So all of this can be displayed as a quadrant diagram:




or to use snapshots from Facebook sites:



(as this is all about identity I'll mention that the Facebook music choices and "World's Smallest Political Quiz" results badge are from friends' Facebook sites, but that the list of bookmarks and the tag cloud are mine)

And what's the point of this? Well, from a SkillClouds perspective we are talking about developing a tool that has the potential to be about identity ...