Writing Online

NASA is collaborating with others in Second Life.

Snelson and other space activists have set up virtual shop on (and above) Space CoLab Island, adjacent to the International Spaceflight Museum. The island, which serves as Second Life’s nexus for NASA and allied space groups, boasts a high-tech headquarters building, a mountaintop meeting room and amphitheater, and three levels of “skypods” floating directly above the mountain. …
NASA is serious about using Second Life as a frontier for collaboration and technology, said Jessy Cowan-Sharp (a.k.a. DragonFire Kelly) of Ames Research Center. “If you look at the functionality of Second Life, it’s really just a set of tools that you can do whatever you want with,” she told MSNBC.com. “There’s so much more going on with Second Life than games.”

Jill Walker writes about someone stealing her URL. Her URL is jill/text.net and an extremist middle-eastern blog called Samson Blinded has started using jill/txt.org. Why would someone use the first part of her domain name? She responds,

This is clearly a site that, finding conventional means [for advertising] blocked, has chosen to use unconventional means to reach an audience. Putting copies of their blog on domains that are very close to established but completely unrelated blogs is apparently one of their strategies.

Kim Cameron, Architect of Identity and Access in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, has a blog called Identity Weblog. It’s technical but offers an inside look from the architecture of identity on the Internet.

Frank Gruber, senior product manager at AOL, has a “Web 2.0 online identity video” (via Digital-Ethos) in which he posits,

We’re all having an identity crisis. Am I really how I present myself on Myspace? Are you?

And he offers other interesting thoughts and questions.

USA Today has updated their website to include quite a few new features, including social sharing ones (via TechCrunch). More and more, newspapers and other mainstream services are moving away from their print origins and taking on a Web 2.0 identity.

Over at digital-ethos is a short post, “Intellagirl on the ‘Story of Digital Identity’ Podcast“:

Paul Madsen, Conor Cahill, Richard Piccarreto and I participated in Aldo Castaneda’s Digital Identity podcast last week. Have a listen! We discussed everything from OpenID to how digital identities are formed. It was a blast and I learned a bunch from these great guys. Have a listen and I’m sure you’ll learn a thing or two as well.

jill/txt, reading Charlotte Hägström’s chapter for her class’s World of Warcraft anthology, reported on this quote from Giddens:

A person’s identity is not to be found in behavious [sic]. Nor - important though this is - in the reactions of othersm [sic] but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. (Giddens 1991:54; emphasis his)

This is most likely a quote from Anthony Giddens, who is well-known for his theory of structuration, which looks at how human agency and social life interact with each other.

I wonder how one separates one’s behaviors over time from the narrative they create, unless as David Gauntlett writes concerning Giddens’ thoughts:

Self-identity, then, is not a set of traits or observable characteristics. It is a person’s own reflexive understanding of their biography. Self-identity has continuity - that is, it cannot easily be completely changed at will - but that continuity is only a product of the person’s reflexive beliefs about their own biography (Giddens 1991: 53).

So, what narrative(s) is being maintained by our websites and blogs?

Senator Barack Obama, who announced his candidacy for president, has set up not only a Facebook presence (see One Million Strong for Obama? by Joshua Levy) but also his own online community at My.BarackObama.com (via Blogger’s Blog). What sort of presidential identity is he creating for himself?

Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology, has a fascinating, 4 1/2 minute video (Web 2.0 … The Web is Us/ing Us) on the influence of digital text, and thus, the web, on us, and vice versa (via jill/txt). In particular, the separation of content from form (i.e., the code, such as html and xml) has enabled easy web authoring, blogging, wikis, and other online writing tools. The video shows how it isn’t just information that is linked on the web, but people as they collaborate and link to one another. What does that mean with respect with differentiating between “real” and “virtual” reality, online and offline identity, authorship and copyright, …?

Jon Udell has an interesting post, Who can see which parts of my published surface area?

To describe the various projections of ourselves into cyberspace, I use the following metaphor: we’re cells, and we’re growing the surface area of our cellular membranes. Every time I write a blog item, or post a Flickr photo, or tag a resource in del.icio.us, I enlarge the surface area of that membrane. I do it for two reasons. First, because I want influence to flow from me to the world. Second, because I want influence to flow the other way too. I’m soliciting feedback and interaction.

I monitor that feedback using an array of sensors that works surprisingly well. All of the parts of my public membrane can be instrumented with RSS feeds. By tuning into those feeds, I know — fairly immediately and comprehensively — who has touched which parts of my exposed surface area.

What I can’t do very easily, though, is visualize that entire complex surface. If somebody reacts to something I published years ago on some site I’ve forgotten about, I’m reminded that part of my surface area extends to that site. But it’s only a reactive thing, there’s no proactive way to review the totality of my published corpus. That’d be handy.

He then continues on about how computers might eventually help us see our full selves in Cyberspace. But I wonder, We don’t see all of the inner workings of our conscious mind, much less our subconscious. So, what would it mean to be aware of all that we had published on the web?