Reputation and identity: Two different things
Britt Blaser writes about my comment that "people must own every aspect of their identity" that:
.... individuals never own every aspect of their own ID, because it's our collective sense of a person that matters, not theirs. Let's expand upon our conception of modeling an ideal marketplace:
When Big Bob, the prosperous, straight-talking village blacksmith, strolls into the agora, shoppers and merchants who have grown up with Bob project upon him their collective respect and comfort. When Bob's brother, the unfortunate town drunk, lurches into the square, another collective persona is painted on ol' Fred. No one in the village would let Fred sleep outside on a harsh night, but they don't get out their best wares for him.
This is human nature at work—we make each other into what we have concluded about each other.
Britt's example deals with reputation, not with identity. They are deeply intertwined, but they are different. Identity is a description of who we are, involves our consent to refer to us in a particular way, and the right to use our identity in reference to the conduct of business.
Talking about people, such as ascribing upstandingness or drunkeness to someone, deals with reputation and is governed in the plain old world in a very different way than identity. If I claim to be Big Bob but am not, I am guilty of lying (if I don't use his identity to conduct business) or fraud (if I do conduct business using Bob's identity). On the other hand, if I say Bob is a drunk because his brother is a drunk, then I am slandering him. If I write that Bob is a drunk, I am libeling him.
Britt suggests that we will have to leave it to human nature. We should, and human nature has distinguished between identity and reputation for millennia. Taking his example of Xpertweb, it relies on mechanisms that are the product of human nature: we enter into agreements, sell stuff, buy things and so forth based on negotiated terms. If I offer to sell you something but refuse to let you rate me on Xpertweb by remaining anonymous, you won't likely buy if you're concerned about accountability, will you? That's because I've withheld my identity so that you cannot affect my reputation. Two different things.
We make our judgements about others, but we do not make others into what we judge them to be. Each of us decides how we will allow ourselves--our identities--to be used. That would include earning a reputation for being unwilling to allow our identities to be used, which could be perceived as untrustworthy.
My position is that casual interactions do not constitute a grant of access to identity. Access to identity and, conversely, maintenance of anonymity, is something to be negotiated in every case in the increasingly connected networked economy. Technology facilitates the increased number of interactions and can be used to govern the exchange of information during those interactions. I'd qualify as an absolutist about the rights of the individual, being a small "l" civil libertarian.
The policies that govern these interactions need to be debated in terms of rights, not simply technology, because the technology will shape the final form of the digitally-enabled society.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at December 30, 2002 07:24 PM | TrackBack