Participation Literacy

When I was about to write this piece of text I had Dick Hardt’s concept in mind (below) but still thought it would be worthwhile to check what the encyclopaedias say about the concept identity. As I expected there is no single entry for the word identity in for example Encyclopedia Britannica, since the concept is too diverse. The Wikipedia entry has what they call a disambiguation page. A disambiguation page is a list with all the articles which would naturally be called the same word, but actually has different denotations. For the word identity the disambiguation page looks like this:

Identity may refer to one of the following:

• In creative works:
• Identity is a novel written by Milan Kundera.
• Identity is a movie starring John Cusack.
• Identity (music), a transformation of pitches in music.
• In business:
• Corporate identity is the physical manifestation of a business brand.
• Identity theft is the deliberate appropriation of someone else’s identity (without that person’s permission) for criminal purposes.
• In social science and psychology:
• Identity (social science) (or “social identity”). In the social sciences, identity has specific meanings, stemming from cognitive theory, sociology, politics, and psychology. See also identity politics.
• Ethnic identity is a person’s self-affiliation (or categorization by others) as a member of an ethnic group.
• Gender identity is the gender with which a person identifies (or is identified by others).
• Digital identity is the representation of identity in terms of digital information.
• Online identity is the digital identity established by computer network users.
• In philosophy:
• Identity is the sameness of two things (also see law of identity).
• In the philosophy of mind, the identity theory of mind holds that the mind is identical to the brain.
• Philosophy is also concerned with personal identity.
• In mathematics:
• An identity is an equality that holds regardless of the values of its variables.
• An identity object is an entity that does not change other objects: see identity function, identity element, identity matrix, and identity morphism.
• In computer science:
• Identity (object-oriented programming), a property of objects that allows those objects to be distinguished from each other.

All these terms are both concepts in themselves and subordinate to the identity concept. As I see it, the word identity is in itself empty; though it of course has a definition entry in every dictionary. Oxford Reference Online (restricted access!) writes “the fact of being whom or what a person or thing is”. This dictionary entry identity is practically useless in most settings – such as the academic – so it is almost necessary to use one of the more precise terms. When Dick Hart writes and talks about Identity 2.0 – he is the father of that concept – he uses the general term but what he really means is one of the concepts above – or a reconstruction of one of these.

Several of these identity concepts would be interesting to give the suffix 2.0, such as philosophy of mind, identity morphism or gender identity – though, practicalities as time and space force me to leave these concepts to my future research. If I was to pair one or several of these terms or concepts with Dick Harts Identity 2.0, it would be digital or online identity. I will expand the discussion somewhat after an introduction of Dick Hart’s concept of Identity 2.0.