WRITTEN ON June 2nd, 2005 BY Luke Razzell AND STORED IN Identity
Following on from Lance Piper’s intriguing piece on how he feels Multiple Identifiers are Inevitable, I absolutely concur with the idea that identifiers (and indeed identity itself) are best considered a matter of subjective opinion rather than objective fact.
In this regard, I believe we can learn much from considering the identity net by anthropomorphic analogy. After all, technology is fashioned by and for humans, so it naturally re-capitulates key aspects of our physical and psychological makeup: we can deepen our understanding of how the identity net might work, I feel, by thinking of it in terms of digital Body, Brain and Mind.
And from this point of view, my notional government-mediated identity would represent simply the government’s “opinion” of my identity…
The emotions this debate generates suggests is not at the level “is the CSA a good idea and wil it make a good IT project”. It challenges our view of the world as Galileo did, or perhaps like “The Prisoner”. The ID project appears to imply we are to be viewed as ciphers. We feel different about it.
I find Luke’s unpacking of the issue into brain, mind and body helpful. And if it was clearly just our government-mediated identity that was being coldly digitised, searched, mined – and we felt that our real identity was unsullied by the process – perhaps we would be less upset about it.