x-posted to Oddletters the Blog

Last week, I had the honor of speaking on one of the plenary panels at the Media in Transition conference at MIT. I talked about an idea I've been playing with, identity versus presence in the online space. People seemed interested in hearing a little more, so here are my thoughts on the subject right now.

The theme of the conference was public and private media, and there were lots of amazing panels talking about, in one way or another, performances, manifestations, usurpations, and repurposings of identity online. The presentations were brilliant, but as I'm coming down off of writing my masters thesis on activist DDOS actions (ten days till final submission!), I found myself thinking about the concept of "presence," and how the online space, and the civic space in general, is and is not structured to allow manifestations of presence over performances of identity.

Did you know there's a level of Dots Per Inch after which your eye simply cannot see any difference? Any added level of detail isn't perceptible to you unless you select an area to zoom in on, changing the inches over which the dots are distributed.

This is what came to mind when listening to the Oversharing Forum at Media In Transition 8 conference at MIT's Media Lab. The speakers covered EverydayCarry, the panopticon, and quantitative self. The point was brought up of how you must always assume you are being surveilled, and it only takes one person in a group to be recording for the entire group to be documented. The responsibility was bandied from the person recording to the person being recorded, to the person sharing, to the spaces themselves have default settings for recording (or not) (think theaters vs conferences). Zittrain brought up that the only way to NOT be recorded is to not do anything notable, and that is a long dark path of social blandness and fragility.