KonzeptioNerd

Disposable Identities (Was: “Are You Dr. Jekyll or Mr Hyde?”)

PR-Blogger Klaus Eck muses (in German) about the mashup of private, business and public identities in the Web 2.0 (Sind Sie Dr. Jekyll oder Mr. Hyde?. His gist: There’s no significant split between on- and offline identities (or personalities). The reason: Jykell can split off his more aggressive traits into Hyde and then disclaim responsibility for Hyde’s actions. The online realm, on the other hand, is a vast memory and earlier misdemeanours are prone to pop up when we can use them least (e.g. in the Google-results of a prospective employer).

As far as I remember, the split between the Jekyll and Hyde personalities of Robert L. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll was neither complete, stable, nor painless. As the tale progresses, Jekyll can less and less controll his transformation and in the end, both embodiments/identities die.

Eck warns that the web’s vast memory is even less forgiving than some poor Jekyll’s conscience. Instead of regaling “unsuitable” behaviours to the online realm, he recommends guarding one’s reputation even more closely while one’s online.

Without hard data or good quotes to back up my hunch, I think that “Sind Sie Dr. Jekyll oder Mr. Hyde” has been written for an implicit audience of people who came to the web rather later in life. People with public or professional personas well in place and excited to find a new playground online where nobody knows they’re a dog.

I can well imagine that (young) people who grow up with the web incorporate it in their metamorphoses and self-searchings just like clothes and cliques and hairdoes and tatoos. And hairdoes rather than tatoos: multiple email addresses and registrations with disposable email addresses and fake credentials (who really submits their address and date of birth online unless they absolutely have to?) result in multiple disposable identities that are hard to track and relate.

I’ve recently read somewhere hat Web 2.0 users are members of an average of 7 online communities simultaneously. It’d be interesting to see figures on the number of email-addresses used, the number of deserted community-profiles, the migration-rate among registration-based services and the percentage of real-name / real-data registrations versus semi-anonymized ones.

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