Participation Literacy

Dion Hinchcliffe also made reflections about Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0. He reads it more as a control mechanism:

So, controlling anarchy on the writetable Web might be as simple asking that folks flash their Identity 2.0 credential right before they change something on the Internet. This ensures their personal identity is attached to the change. And creating a verifiable chain of evidence might be all it takes for people to act more responsibly. Wiki vandalism, comment flaming, and other forms of anonymous mischief on the writeable Web may be eliminated forever when you know that your ID will be attached to it in perpetuity, affecting your hireability, possible suitability for public office, and more, forever.

Of course, there will be attendant problems with this approach including a rapidly vanishing anonymity on the Web. But that just might remain a nice artifact of being a read-only Web user.(Hinchcliffe, 2006)

Dion Hinchcliffe interprets Identity 2.0 as a control mechanism. Every time someone makes a change on the Web, they have to identify themselves. In that case vandalism can be traced back to the person who made the change. I can understand his wish for a “clean” and more trustable Web. His view of Identity 2.0 would certainly render a lot of input for future CI machines. In one respect the huge amount of input to the CI machines is an exciting thought, but in another respect it is kind of frightening. In an anonymous comment to this article, the commenter argues that there are many reasons to keep an untraceable identity. He or she writes that they have been harassed and stalked IRL (In Real Life). because some people were upset about some articles. Hinchcliffe answered the anonymous commenter the following: “I agree with you that anonymity is very important in some situations. However, many times (the majority even?) the motivations for being anonymous are to cover up poor behaviour” (Hinchcliffe, 2006).

Collective Intelligence builds on, and feeds on, traces. Traces are one of the most fundamental parts of Web 2.0, but traces can also be a potential threat, either if you have controversial views on politics or similar things, or if you are well known and therefore can be thought of as a prey for certain groups in society – the controversial thoughts might even just be in “the eye of the beholder”.

In one way Hinchcliffe is right in his answer to the commenter above. But there are many reasons why people would want to be anonymous, such as every part of a person’s life where he or she might be counted as other than normal, health problems for example. Even though Identity 2.0 might have possibilities, there are many problems, and I think it is hard to envision an implementation in the near future.

The discussion above is based on the idea of the democratic society. In an undemocratic society, every central control of identities would be devastating. We do not even have to go to totalitarian states to get an idea of the outcome of a central Web identity control. The US government, and others, has proved the word democracy to be stretchable in the hunt for terrorists.