Participation Literacy

The concept of Identity 2.0 is mostly linked with Dick Hardt. Dick Hardt is founder and CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of Sxip Networks, developers of SXIP, the Simple eXtensible Identity Protocol.

Dick Hardt founded Sxip (pronounced: “skip”) in October 2003 with a vision of a simple, secure and open identity network that enables individuals to create and manage their online digital identities.

Sxip was conceived several years earlier while Dick was CEO of ActiveState , a leader in anti-spam technologies and tools for Open Source programming languages. He recognized that a lightweight, user-centric, Identity Management solution was a critical missing piece of Web infrastructure. The paradigm of digital identity needed to evolve beyond single-entity user accounts and authentication systems into an expressive identity platform, as ubiquitous, multi-purpose and fail-safe as the Internet itself. (from background pages)
Dick proposes that aspects of an individual’s identity should be disaggregated so people or organizations needing to identify the individual only see those characteristics they need in order to support a decision (Hardt, 2005). Those characteristics could be that you are old enough to buy a drink, rather than exactly how old you are, where you live, etc. Further, he outlines the notion of trusted ‘home sites’, with which an individual might entrust aspects of their identity, and to which those in need of identity validation would then address appropriate requests for fulfilment.

Identity 2.0, and similar thoughts, could be a solution to some of the security and integrity problems talked about in media the last few years. Perhaps we do not need to dispatch our identities on the Internet or anywhere else. Perhaps it will be enough to give a company, the authorities, or even other individuals, parts of our identity; the only parts needed in that particular situation. Perhaps we will turn into fragments of our selves. And perhaps many people we meet in different situations will only get to know a situated part of our selves.

Dick Hart has written a short text called Multiple Personas in Identity 2.0. In this text he uses the concept persona:

A goal of Identity 2.0 is to mimic aspects of identity transactions that work well in the physical world. We all have different personas depending on context. I present different aspects of myself depending on wether I am interacting with my mother, my friends, my employees, a server at a restaurant, or my banker. In the online world, we will need the same way to compartmentalize our identity in ways so that we present subsets depending on context. There is no need or desire for a single, global identifier. A logical progression of this is the ability to have a 1:1 relationship, where a given persona is used only at one site, providing anonymity between sites. (Hardt, 2006)

I interpret Hart’s usage of the word persona as a person’s social role, which is the most common usage of the concept. Normally we (or more exactly I) see identity as a stable entity and the persona as more or less instable. Dick Hart’s concept would lead to a kind of instability and fragmentation in both identity and persona.

I do not think it is too far fetched to draw a parallel to some of the stories in Allucquére Rosanne Stone’s book The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (1995).