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Month: October 2008

Composite Identity: A Collection of Wholes

Published October 14, 2008 by cgerrish

African Masks

Lately I’ve been thinking about identity as a composite. There was a point where I was convinced by the reversal of poles – switching from the system-based identity to the user-centered identity. An individual has many roles and she can reveal whichever identity attributes that are necessary for a particular transaction. We think of these fragments of identity as the pieces that make up the whole. But another way to look at it is to think of identity of a composite of wholes. Some elements match exactly, but live in a different name space. It’s probably not a complete list, or maybe it’s too long, but here’s an an initial take on the modes of identity. Each one could be consider a whole identity.

  • Anonymous
  • Citizen
    • City
    • State
    • Nation
    • Journalist
    • Politician
  • Social
    • Public
    • Private / Restricted
    • Artist/Writer
  • Personal
    • Medical
    • Legal
    • Financial
  • Consumer
    • Public
    • Private / Restricted / VRM
  • Business
    • Employer
    • Employee
    • Contractor
    • Proprietor

If identity is composite, should there be a single control point? If there were to be a single point of access to the management of this identity, authentication would have to be both multi-factor and multi-band.

Should we put all our eggs in one basket? With investment portfolios we preach diversification– we seek assets that don’t correlate in changing markets. It’s called covariance, we don’t want everything to go up or down at the same time. If we can’t risk a single control point, then we need to move to multiple control points. And in fact, even the ownership of identity is in question. We hear a lot about “my data” and “my identity,” but there is no data or identity outside the Network. The idea of multiple control points means more than I control my identity from multiple credential sets, it means I share control of my identity with other entities. The power and political economy of an identity is distributed throughout a network of relations. We don’t live in a frictionless plane, we live as mortals, among mortals, in this world that unfolds around us in the stream of time.

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The Story and The Clip: Keeping Life Present

Published October 12, 2008 by cgerrish

Reading Newspapers

We are storytellers.

Many years ago, when I was in the public relations business, the news cycles were much longer. I would read 4 or 5 newspapers a day– morning and evening editions. You could easily watch the set of stories being reported change over the days. Some stories had legs, others came and went, filling out the rest of the paper. Seasonal and evergreen stories came around each year like clockwork. We also had a news clipping service that tracked our clients’ names. A room full of people read the paper each day and clipped out the stories put them in an envelope and mailed them to us. Looking at the patterns of syndication, you could see how stories spread from one newspaper to another. That way of making sense of the stories we tell each other is no longer an efficient method to yield the storyline of our culture.

Sunday is a great news day. The newspapers are filled to the brim– I still like to read at least three; and the morning political talk shows are filled with news maker interviews and analysis. While I still filter through a large stack of newsprint to find the most interesting clips of the day, my methods have had to evolve. By the way, here are a few pointers from this morning:

The digital record of our history is piling up around us, providing an inexhaustible supply of frozen transcripts to hold over our heads and point at. So much is gathered into the digital archive, how can we make sense of it now? How do we turn it into a story we can understand?

Woody Guthrie jams

I now depend on a variety of filters to snag the best bits, the most important clips from Sunday’s output and drop pointers to them into the Tw*tter stream. I want the best clips, no matter what their source. The publication I read is jam session assembled every day by  a circle of freelance editors I’ve discovered on the Network.

The new models of journalism work on this same basis. Both The Huffington Post and Tina Brown’s new vehicle, The Daily Beast, break down the walls separating a particular publication from the rest of the Network. It’s the pointers that are valuable, not the walls around the garden of a publication. More and more we’re seeing those hyperlinks pointing to both professional and amateur sources; both inside and outside of a publication; both inside and outside this country. The sense of the space of a publication has profoundly changed.

The sense of time has changed as well. The old news cycles were based on the physical processes required to write, edit, typeset, print and deliver a newspaper. The new cycles are based on both the new technologies and the fact that life unfolds in real time. It is continuous, it always has been. Access to the raw real time feed is important, but it’s in the clips and stories that we memorialize our lives. It’s the pointer I send you, and the one you send me, that helps me make sense of what just happened.

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Permission To Go Live: Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright

Published October 6, 2008 by cgerrish

There are some recordings by Bob Dylan that I’ve played over and over again. Each time I play them they’re exactly the same. The quality of the sound differs, but the intention is that a recording offers an identical experience. I’ve listened to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” so many times I’m able to reproduce a facsimile of it in my mind at will.

This morning during my Sunday morning trip to the newsstand, I picked up a copy of UNCUT magazine with Bob Dylan on the cover. I was interested in reading about the latest release in the Bootleg Series called “Tell Tale Signs.” There’s a quote at the top of the article that goes like this:

“Have I ever played any song
twice exactly the same?”

“No, Bob, No”

“See? I don’t do that.”

So while I have a fixed idea of what a particular Dylan song sounds like, Dylan doesn’t think of his songs– or any songs as working that way. He never takes the play out of playing a song. I read somewhere that he never listens to his recordings; the song he carries with him is way on down the road from that day it was mixed down to a master.

In a world of scarcity– there’s only room for one version of a song- the one that will make the record company money. That’s the old model. In a world of abundance, each time we revisit a song, it’s never the same. The trap of the digital is that it only makes identical copies. The freeing potential of the digital is that every version of every page of Wikipedia is available. We now have an economic framework that can support releasing every version. Buy a single instance, or access to all versions– access to the version control system.

This set of ideas can’t be contained in one area of culture or commerce.

Doc Searls writes about the new way that writing is produced:

Traditional journalism is static. Its basic units are the article, the story, the piece. The new journalism is live. It doesn’t have a basic unit any more than a river or a storm have a basic unit. It’s process, not product. Even these things we call posts, texts, tweets and wikis are less unitary than contributory. They add to a flow, which in turn adds to what we know.

Steve Gillmor writes about the way the companies communicate, through official static planned releases of information or with live conversations through the Network.

Real work gets done in these conversations, and typically this work is being performed in the “open� because the participants realize (and have been given “permission� to work at this live level) that they have little to fear from competition because their access to participation trumps others who by definition have to react after the fact. Not only has the value moved on to the next set of conversations, but the product of this work is now being marketed to the audience most likely to buy it.

In both culture and commerce we’re looking for permission to go live, to sing the song a different way every time. But we also need to hear the song differently every time and start a conversation about it. Now, not everyone will want to go down that road. When faced with Bob Dylan in concert, some will be angered by a song sung in a new way. And when we get to that crossroads— most likely you’ll go your way, and I’ll go mine.

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The Suspension of Time and Construction of the Double

Published October 5, 2008 by cgerrish

I recently saw San Francisco Opera’s production of Erich Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt. The title means ‘The Dead City’ and refers to the city of Bruges. Ostensibly the story is of a man who is obsessed with his dead wife to the point that it threatens his sanity. The production was excellent and is highly recommended.

The protagonist, Paul, moves to Bruges– but basically moves outside of time and space. Because of his loss, he employs his force of will to suspend the passage of time. He reverses time and keeps it idling in the moments of his idyll. Time stops and he constructs and altar to the past. But an altar and icons are not sufficient for a living relationship. A double must be produced to stand in for the lost one, to bring the past into the present.

Die Tote Stadt is often linked to Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. In Hitch’s story a secret love is lost and recreated piece by piece. Time is suspended so that the hero, Scottie, can return to the path not taken and experience the love he repressed. He thinks he is a puppetmaster, but in this story of multiple levels, he’s also a puppet being controlled the the simple mechanism of his fear of heights.

One story, Die Tote Stadt, ends with the hero walking away from the dead city and returning to sanity and life. The other ends with the hero killing the object of his obsession through a misunderstanding of the story he occupies. Because Scottie has suspended the passage of time, to live in a story outside of time, he doesn’t perceive the story going on around him.

There are other examples of the construction of a double to fill an emptiness. In My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins constructs a lady suitable to be his companion. The construction of the double starts with an older man finding a younger woman with a physical resemblance. The young woman’s life and identity must be erased in favor of the object of his obsession. His story must replace hers, an event that can never truly happen.

It’s a powerful pattern often played out in both fiction and real life. Presidential candidate John McCain is deeply enmeshed in this drama. He has suspended time, retreated to the past, looks forward to a nostalgic future and has attempted to construct a double to stand by his side in a story unfolding outside of time. What McCain doesn’t seem to understand is that while he plays out his nostalgic dream, he is a character in a drama unfolding in real time. In a post-modern twist, Henry Higgins learns to speak Cockney slang so he can become the suitable consort of Eliza Doolittle. While his story will end soon, he has enabled her future. Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets…

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