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February 06, 2005
you are what you is
(Excerpted from a longer entry at Areté)
This week’s NetRhets topic is network literacy, which inevitably leads to some discussion of identity. Miles and Yuille list it as #5 on their Creative Computing Manifesto:
5. inside the network
Network literacy is the ability to engage with and represent yourself within the network.
With my static professional site, I have a fairly good idea of how I’m representing myself to the world. Representation on this blog, however, is far more problematic to me. One of the wonderful and confusing things about blogs is the fact that they’re one of the only documents that permit shifting identities within the document itself. Print is fixed; the author/originator/creator's identity is fixed with it, at least within that volume. An author's identity may shift over the course of their ouvre, but once an individual work is fixed, things don’t change within it. Not so for the blog, which as a dynamic digital document is much more of a living thing. As the blogger changes, the document changes with it. This demonstrated, public change is part of what makes long-term blogging and blog reading so worthwhile - Dorothea, Bobbi, and AKMA have all grown and changed since I began reading them three years ago, and their blogs don’t look or read the same as they did then. The problems have more to do with external researchers than they do with the bloggers themselves (although Bobbi may disagree, given the process she’s gone through lately with hers). How do you categorize something whose identity is constantly in flux? How do you account for the changeable nature of the document? We can work with the larger genre of blog, but what particular identity does it present, and when is it which identity?
If you’d like to read the rest, which contains a certain amount of navel gazing, check over here
Posted by kkennedy at February 6, 2005 06:21 PM