Case Story: Multiplicity

Summary	Separating work-related digital identity from other identities
Group / workshop	Digital Identities	Status	seed
Project details...

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

I participate in various different activities, each with different, largely non-overlapping, "social networks" - friends, work-related networks, several different networks related to non-work hobbies and interests.

As part of my work, I am expected to have a reasonably visible digital identity: people expect to find "me" and my work on the Web; I'm expected to engage in current discussions through an increasing range of digital channels, including the use of various forms of "social software", all of which leave their visible traces, and I expose various aspects of my "self" as part of those interactions. And I accept that, and I make use of a range of such tools and services in the course of my work, and I recognise their value.

However, on a couple of occasions over the last year I've had the experience of an exchange with a new work contact where they had some information about me that I hadn't expected them to know - it wasn't anything embarrassing or "damaging" to me, and I'd probably have been happy to chat about it to someone I'd got to know slightly, but being faced with the situation where someone had obtained the information before even meeting me made me very conscious of the amount of information that I had (probably somewhat naively) made available to people I don't know at all.

In the pre-Web days, the fact that my work-related contacts were mostly distinct from my interest-based contacts, and our exchanges were mostly face-to-face or on paper (typically of limited circulation), was mostly sufficient in itself to ensure that I maintained a certain level of privacy and control over the information I disclosed about myself, because it took a moderate degree of effort to draw information together.

In the Web world, where almost all of those activities involve me creating and receiving content on the Web (on mailing lists & bulletin boards, on weblogs, on wikis, on Flickr, on microblogging services, and so on), and particularly where that content is available for indexing by global search engines, the situation becomes rather different. It is trivial for anyone to pull together different sources on the basis of a search for my name, with the content of that "aggregate view" largely outside of my control and determined by the algorithms of a search engine.

Task

What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

Increasingly, I try to limit the information that I associate with my public "work-related" identity to that which is reasonably closely related to my work activities - which really means limiting the information I publicly associate with my birth name, and with userids/nicknames/email addresses etc I often use in combination with it.

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

Over the last year or so I've deleted accounts on various services (probably most notably Facebook and LinkedIn) where I had disclosed my birth name (or used the userid/nickname I frequently associate with it) and exposed a moderate level of personal information; and on services where I still have an account, I've restricted the quantity and/or visibility of the information I've provided (e.g. my Twitter stream is now protected). Of course that applies to the information sources that I create; it's rather more difficult for content created by others, where for the most part I have no control, though I have asked friends to consider editing pages!

For other activities/networks, I've constructed and maintain other "identities", based on other names/userids, which I don't publicly associate with my birth name.

Results

What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

I've tried to take control of, and - at least slightly - reduce, the information which is visibly associated with my "work-related" identity.

Lessons Learned

What did you learn from the experience?

1. I use multiple different digital identities, and they are each conditioned by different contexts of use.

2. My digital identities are constructs which I need to take responsibility for and manage. That adds complexity, takes time and, in some cases, money (where I pay for additional subscriptions/accounts on the same service).

3. The digital identity I associate with my birth name is now largely conditioned by the principal context of use for that identity i.e. my (paid) work

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.