authenticity

This week Rhode Island repealed a law which criminalised lying online (maximum penalty: a year in prison). Apparently, the law was enacted to fight online fraud, but the breadth of the drafting meant that it could conceivably apply to all sorts of online communications. It's interesting that this law was ever passed, but what I think is particularly interesting is that in the coverage of its repeal the standard line has been "well... everybody lies online". Of course, it's persuasive that criminalising lying in one communicative context while it is simply frowned upon elsewhere is problematic and chilling on free speech and for these (and other) reasons it's great that the law was repealed; but the framing of online dishonesty as something everybody does got me thinking about authenticity online and the way that we think about 'the truth' in networked publics.

Would we be so quick to say that "everybody lies" in the meatverse? Do we conceive of everyone as fundamentally untrustworthy in our day to day lives, or is there something specific to the digital realm that encourages this view?

Of course, evaluations of 'authenticity' online lack the situatedness, the physical and verbal cues of a similar assessment in the real world, and I'm sure that informed the development of a view that online identities were merely masks that could not be trusted as you couldn't 'reach' the person behind them (to verify, or to shame; to regulate); no doubt this is why things like the friendster 'fakester' scandal reverberated so far.

However, part of me wonders whether the vision of the online self as a slippery, untrustworthy, un-pin-downable fiction is becoming outdated these days. We are entering the web 2.0-verse of multi-sited, transferable online identities, with online histories and online reputations - we are fleshing ourselves out online. People are more truly fixed as themselves in more places online than they have ever been. Surely at some point this new version of online citizenship will overtake the shadowy who's who of the irc-verse?

Indeed, even now we seem to be seeing less of a discourse around the need to secure identity and more of a resistance to corporate/legal solutions to identity authenticity (eg debates about online passports or real name policies). To me, the discourse around truth and authenticity vs performativity and play seems to be increasingly pregnant with the desire to hold on to a notion of the web as a 'lawless frontier'; increasingly pregnant just as this view seems, for good or ill, to be  becoming increasingly untenable in the corporatised web we live in now.

So where does that leave us? Worryingly, I feel like Rhode Island is repealing its law at a time when the law is becoming redundant anyway; that the challenge is no longer a matter of finding ways to insist upon authenticity but rather a question of how to find room for any kind of multiplicity...

Yes I am, but who am I really?

Just when you decide to stop talking about Facebook and privacy...

So Facebook went ahead and changed my email address; in fact, they changed everyone's email address - switched us all over to our 'Facebook' emails (mine is kate.willcox.52@facebook.com, apparently - catchy) in an effort to gain users for their mail service and capture more market share.

Of course, they let you change it back, and apparently for new users there is going to be an opt in/opt out option, but yet again we see Facebook monkeying with our personal data for their own gain. 

Now I'm sure that lots of people take the view that we have signed up for this in choosing to use Facebook - after all, it's their network, we just live in it. But there is something particularly troubling about a social networking site changing facts about us, and it is compounded in circumstances where the changes made are to further their commercial objectives (not only does it increase use of Facebook mail & decrease use of competitor mail programs, it also turns us all into advertisements for Facebook mail). What is to stop them changing my photos or facts about my life to make them more Facebook friendly? (Here I am in my Facebook tshirt. Here I am posting how cute Mark Zuckerberg is. Except, wait, it wasn't me posting those things!)

There is something almost Orwellian about these erasures - about which we weren't even informed (or if we were I missed the memo) - and they strike at important identifiers about our online identity.

This seems especially ironic to me given that earlier today I was reading twitter's policy on use of the brand (I'm sure Facebook has something similar), and there was a great deal of "thou shalt not" mess around with the trademark - no putting the bird in a cage. Meanwhile, Facebook is messing around with aspects of our trademarks, not to mention our user experience, and apparently there is little we can do about it.

What do you think? Is it a reasonable step for Facebook to take? Should we accept these little incursions into our autonomy - and identity - as the cost of using the network?

it's not what you're like, it's what you like

According to Business Insider, new company Likester's Adcenter is revealing "surprising and depressing" trends in what people like on Facebook. 

Putting aside the obvious privacy concerns (because who really needs to talk about privacy on facebook AGAIN), what struck me about this latest iteration of behavioural advertising is how close it is coming to creating an entire composite of a person through their preferences - my identity is getting fleshed out on line in direct proportion to the extent to which I choose to support brands.

In a lot of ways, this isn't that different from the meatworld. I have strong memories of my ninth grade back pack (army surplus baby), which was marked up with all of my favourite bands in thick black and blue permanent marker (sonic youth; nirvana; bikini kill) - and true, I did spend money on their albums and tshirts and shows, and this communicated those aspects of my identity to other kids. It also communicated other things about my consumer (and no doubt also moral) choices: in that sense "sonic youth" was a complex signifier for converse sneakers, thrift store shopping, coen brothers movies appreciating etc etc. 

But I guess the main point of difference now is that online you have to write yourself into existence, there is no you outside of that (although for kids coming up today I imagine they can't imagine a time when they didn't exist online - I'd be interested to know how that impacts on the sense of self). So the entirety of the communication of self is what you can write on your hyperlinked backpack (or facebook wall) - so what does it mean if that information is being used by advertisers to set up a marketing profile for you (and, importantly, others 'like' you) and communicated to corporations so they can better sell to you?

It seems fairly sinister to me (especially as Facebook toys with lowering the age of its users) - and I also can't quite get my head around how to think about the fact that we opt in to this system. I like things on my Facebook (bruce campbell, julia kristeva, slate magazine, etc); and likester itself appears to have a social networking function wherein their likester affinities program tells you what ELSE you might like based on your Facebook profile (could be useful in a video store. Oh, wait). So why are we choosing to commodify our identities in this way? Are we so keen for a better shopping experience that we want to make it easier for stores to target us? Or is there something more complicated going on when we merge our articulation of identity with commericialism?

High Court Appeal Google Adwords

The High Court has given Google leave to appeal April's Federal Court decision in the Adwords case that held Google liable for the misleading and deceptive conduct of their advertisers. The case addresses circumstances where the advertisers concerned used the names of competitors as keywords to trigger their own ads appearing, which meant that the  advertisements purported to be for a company which the account holders did not actually represent. The Federal Court held that Google was also liable for the misleading representations because in publishing the advertisement Google made a representation that the content of the sponsored link responded to the user’s keyword search. 

In finding Google liable for the conduct of the advertisers, the decision obviously has much broader implications for search engine liability for the content of advertisements and the outcome of the appeal to the High Court will be key in shaping the future of online advertising protocols in Australia.

I think there will also have interesting implications for behavioural advertising (or as Google would prefer that we think of it, "internet-based advertising") on the web. After all, the case looks at a fairly clear cut fact pattern: the advertisers concerned misleadingly linked their ad to searches for competitors. However, since Google's search results are tweaked by the personalised search algorithm - and now the social networking algorithm of "Search Plus Your World", we are looking at a rich tapestry of publishers and sources of both consumer deception and risks to privacy - and a search engine which is not afraid to litigate out of liability (and responsibility) for what we are being told.

Nike tweetvertising ban

The UK Advertising Standards Authority has banned a Nike twitter celebrity endorsement campaign on the basis that the footballers concerned did not make it clear that the endorsement tweets were advertisements. Nike argued that consumers would not be misled as it was well known that the players were sponsored by the brand. However, the advertising watchdog determined that this was insufficient - in order to be acceptable it was necessary that the sponsored nature of the tweets be "obviously identifiable", "obvious" and "prominent" (such as #ad) to ensure that they would not be missed by a twitter user scrolling through hundreds of messages a day.

As this is the first ban of a celebrity endorsement by the Authority, it is a very revealing elaboration of exactly how strictly the regulations will be applied to endorsement speech - and, at first glance, apparently quite strictly. It is interesting to note that the tweets themselves did not mention Nike. Rather, they were a reference to the player's 'goals for the year' which simply linked to Nike (implying that it was through Nike that they would achieve these goals) and, according to Nike, both players were free to post the tweets "at their own discretion".

Accordingly, it seems to be the case that a sponsored celebrity cannot even link to one of their sponsors without the linking being regarded as an ad. I wonder whether this would be applied in the same way to bloggers - if I accept an advertisement on my blog, am I no longer able to speak about the advertiser in any way without it being regarded as an ad? And without having to characterise the post as an advertisement? Given the number of bloggers blogging about companies with whom they have a financial relationship, I wonder about the chilling implications of the decision for speech in the blogosphere. What do you think? Is this an advertisement? Is it misleading? Is it good for the watchdog to be extra cautious?

famous for fifteen people

Casting aside Andy Warhol's obsession with time, Momus said that on the web everyone would be famous for fifteen people. The celebritisation of life made possible by the social networks, instant communication and interactivity of web 2.0 has altered the way that we think about ourselves, our friends and our relationship to public spaces. As danah boyd has said, digital natives are the first generation to grow up living in celebrity-style publics.

Thinking about the web and the celebritisation of identity online reminds me of the shift from privacy rights to publicity rights. Publicity rights - a kind of IPR over aspects of your identity - developed out of privacy rights to allow the famous (and infamous) to determine how and by who profits could be derived from their celebrity. While, like other IPRs, they were generally justified by the invocation of Lockean labour theory (you invest time and energy in building a marketable celebrity identity, therefore you should be economically rewarded with a quasi monopoly), they also function as a trade off: celebrities, in pursuing fame, were considered to have traded away their rights of privacy for the more limited (but far more financially rewarding) right of publicity. 

Reflecting on this history in the context of networked publics is complicated. We see, again, users choosing to sacrifice personal privacy for the more financially (or socially) rewarding trope of publicity; and monetizing that publicity in various ways: mommy bloggers, publicising their family lives in exchange for sponsors; twitterers with high klout scores using their fame to endorse product to their legion of followers.

So what does this mean? Are we evolving out of privacy, as Mark Zuckerberg alleges? Are we all trading away our privacy rights for publicity, and, if so, how should the law respond? Currently, many jurisdictions only provide publicity rights to celebrities. In Australia, where the 'right' is protected through passing off (which adds the additional hurdle of consumer deception) it is difficult to see how the everyday netizen could access the protection. And even if law reform was realistic (the ALRC has been recommending various reforms in this arena since 1984), I can't help but wonder whether 'evolving' our law to more actively support and protect the commodification of all Australians is necessarily a good thing. Is trading away our (as yet unelaborated) privacy rights a reasonable bargain?

Identity 2.0

This talk by Dick Hardt is a great intro to some of the technological issues I am going to look at in my thesis. In this talk Dick defines identity as who we are to ourselves and who we are to others. Since he is looking at practical (technical) solutions to the challenge of finding solutions to proving who we are online this approach makes sense; but I think he doesn't really get into the problem of multiplicitous identity online (although arguably his push for user-centric identity is a direct response to that). What do you think? Will a digital driver's licence still allow the liberatory freedom of anonymity and pseudonomity? Do we still think about the web in those terms or is it becoming more of a mirror of the meatworld?

Who am I (online)?

I have started this blog as a place to collect thoughts/ideas/material for my PhD thesis, "Unbound Selves". I am writing on the way that web 2.0 is (maybe) changing the way that we experience/practice/perform our identities. In particular - as I am looking at these questions from a legal standpoint - I am thinking through the creation/allocation/maintenance/&enforcement of rights in the online self.

This is me. My mum hates it when I have bangs.