Brains working towards machine consciousness

I was asked to give my thoughts on Digital Identity and Identity - how they interact and relate to one another. I haven't got round to writing what I really wanted to, so this is just a quick brain dump of some of the issues.

 

Identity is a multi-faceted and complex beast.  We have our own self view, which can be affected by the responses we get from other people, as well as a view of us formed by others.  Furthermore, we tend to have different views of ourselves depending on the “role” we are in – often having quite different behaviours and linguistic patterns in different situations (for instance, when down the pub with mates, or when at the parents’ place, or when with small children). 

 

If we accept the ideas in http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~goguen/courses/275f00/gover-narr.html then the role of a public Digital Identity in forming self certainly has some substance (and this is in keeping with the ideas of narrative identity, I believe).  The formation of identity through narrative is also an element in cognitive behavioural therapy, and setting an aspirational scenario with a narrative to support it is a fairly strong tool for modifying one’s behaviour and personality to fit in with a desired state. 

 

Digital Identity is composed of many parts – there are those elements which we choose to publish, whether it is as a deliberate attempt to manipulate our own self image, others image of us, or to just share information.  There are also trace signals which we leave by searching, or by navigating web sites, although these are not generally available to the public.  Despite the fact they are normally only available to a privileged service provider, that provider’s mode of interaction with us can change as a result of this footprint, and that in itself may modify the way we behave, or the way others see us (although only in a minor way, I think).

 

When we interact with others using online services, the relationships we build are based mainly on levels of digital reputation and the actual ‘content’ of our communications.   The main difference between the way identity is influenced by these online interactions and the equivalent ‘real world’ ones is the persistence of information (and ease of access).  In the old days, one could make a mistake in one’s home village or community, and given enough time there was a good chance it would be forgotten, or the story would be ‘mutated’ with re-telling. Some issues could be persistent for long periods, but by and large the damage to reputation could be escaped by moving to a new location.  On the flip side of the coin, positive actions tended to be reinforced within a community, with closer network ties being formed.  The specifics of a good deed may not have been remembered over the long term, but the idea that you were a nice(clever/brave etc.) person tended to persist quite well (people seem to have a propensity for remembering specific bad things, and for having a warm glow about good things, without necessarily remembering the details – which makes some evolutionary sense, as you need to avoid the risk of very bad things happening to you, but typically only really need to remember that so-and-so is helpful and works well as part of your community)

 

With the persistence of information on the ‘net, the dynamics change.  Bad behaviour can hang around to haunt you, and the increased size of personal networks mean that negative effects can spread more rapidly than used to be the case, even 20 years ago.  Web2.0 makes this even more noticeable.  Coupled with the abilities of our search engines, it is becoming easier to determine how someone is viewed by others, and people are likely to start using that capacity to make judgements about others without ever even interacting with the individual online (if there is a reason to look them up).  The conversations which others might have about someone, effectively behind their backs, can obviously change others level of trust in both the subject of the conversation, and in those who are having the conversation. 

 

On the plus side, although we can see evidence of the re-telling of stories about people changing the ‘facts’ – story telling has a way of relying on exaggeration to help get the point across – the persistence of information means that there is a good chance that with some forensic ability one can find out what was originally said or done (at least as far as the digital record goes). 

 

Another difference is that if we recount something from our past, it reinforces the ‘version’ which we tell.  We effectively modify our own recollection, and it can be influenced by the context in which we re-tell the story.  This is a useful tool for people who are in a community, as they tend towards a common view of historical events (although these can be wildly different from an objective view of those same events!) which helps with social cohesion.   If we blog about something (o otherwise add it to our digital identity) we are less likely to modify it in future re-tellings – if it is available to copy and paste, we are less likely to have to dredge the specifics from our memories and thus the narrative is likely to remain more uniform over time.  It also means we are perhaps less likely to continually rehearse stories from our past, as we can point others to an existing version of it.  Now, this may mean that we develop less clear cut views of ourselves – the repetition acts to reinforce beliefs about our identity, and even if we go back to re-read elements of our DI at a later date, it seems (to me) to have less of a reinforcing nature on the memories – almost as though the act of memorising the events has to some extent been delegated.  This might also mean that if the story does not have the opportunity to evolve through re-telling in different social contexts, we may adapt less to new communities we join.  On the other hand, it may mean that we maintain a greater degree of flexibility and can adapt more readily, as we haven’t ‘burnt’ the narratives into our minds quite so deeply.

 

At the moment, I think it may be too soon to be able to say whether the effects are likely to be positive or negative. However, it is likely that we will adapt both ourselves and the tools so that they provide a positive influence rather than a negative one (otherwise we would tend to just stop using them) and so I would imagine that the outlook is positive.

 

One thing I think is strongly supported by IT, and specifically Web2.0 type technologies, is an increasing ability to maintain multiple ‘facets’.  Keeping elements of narrative, whether historical or aspirational, on different web services means that we should be able to manage our reputations, and thus an element of our identities, to be specific to each community we interact with.  Although cross over can happen, and this can impact on reputation within each community, the ability for a form of anonymity allows us to re-invent ourselves for different online communities with greater ease than we could traditionally in the equivalent real life scenarios.  Coupled with the persistence of information available, it should be easier to maintain the separate personae, tuning them to the communities we interact with.  Having said that, of course, there is also an increasing cognitive load if we try to remember too many of the details necessary for this, and we may find that if you want to practice a multiple-role/multiple-personality approach to web use, that you need to use and rely on the persistence of information to a greater degree (as outsourced memory).