Representations of Identity: Digital and Physical

CSCW 2004 was a great conference on multiple dimensions (for me); personal highlights include participating in a great workshop, exploring Chicago, co-presenting a paper, co-organizing a panel and being inspired by the closing plenary.  I’m going to post separate entries for each of these, starting with the workshop.

The workshop was on "Representations of Digital Identity", in which we explored a range of issues relating to how people represent themselves in the digital world and the physical world.  The organizers — danah boyd, Michele Chang and Liz Goodman — used a number of innovative approaches to facilitate the discussion at the workshop that I think made it a particularly engaging experience, and were rather well-suited to the topic(s) we addressed.

We started out randomly selecting handicaps from a handicap bag (danah’s hat) to influence our initial presentations of selves (introductions), e.g., blindfolding, plugging ears, no use of pronouns … I had the unenviable distinction of picking the "You’ve been bad.  Go stand in the corner while you introduce yourself" handicap.  Our intros included name & affiliation, and an instance of when we experienced some disconnect between our perception of a person’s digital identity and our perception of their physical identity. 

We then were invited to bridge the gap between our own digital and physical representations of selves by writing our email address, domain name or mobile phone number on our foreheads, and study the reactions to these temporary tattoos by those in the room (other workshop participants) and those outside the room (participants of other workshops whom we might encounter during breaks) and even those outside the hotel. 

I kept my "interrelativity.net" forehead tattoo on through the joint workshop dinner (along with the Social Networks workshop) at the Italian Village; apparently, I must have been out of the workshop meeting room when the group voted on whether to retain or erase the tattoos after the workshop, and erasure was the most popular option.  I probably would have kept mine on anyway, as it was pretty interesting to see people glancing at my forehead and then quickly averting their eyes … it’s hard to stare at someone’s forehead without being detected.  I did enjoy a few conversations about the tattoo, the domain name and/or the workshop, among those who were not embarrassed to keep looking.

After inscribing our forehead tattoos, the workshop attendees engaged in some fieldwork, exploring how people were representing identities in and around the loop, reporting back to the workshop later in the day using a variety of formats, including skits, participatory exercises and narrated slideshows. Our group — which included Irina, Louise and Scott — met a man on a Segway in Grant Park near the Art in the Garden exhibit. 

There were many interesting aspects to his physical representations of identity, including the Wales sticker on the Segway (his other Segway has an Ireland sticker on it, and he is quite proud of his Celtic heritage), his Xavier warmup jacket (he is also proud of his alma mater) and his TrekUSA cap (which he wore to spite the bicyclists who pass him on his Segway saying "get a bike").  Interestingly, in our discussion with him, he revealed that he had a digital representation of identity — a match.com profile — which we were able to find and use in our exercise during the afternoon — we showed one group of workshop attendees his match.com profile, another group a photo of the man on his Segway, and another group a closeup photo of his face.  Each group had a different impression of the man’s identity, based on these different representations.

Although we didn’t go into this during the workshop report-out, there were other interesting and relevant aspects that we uncovered during our lunchtime wanderings.  Near the man on the Segway was a group of Columbia College students filming a short piece for a class.  The student doing the filming was wearing a "007" shirt, and reported that he was, in fact, a James Bond fan[atic].  However, a woman that was with him wore a sweatshirt with the logo of Santos, the Brasilian futebol clube, and yet said that she had no particular affinity for either the team or even the sport (she just liked the sweatshirt).  The man they were filming was dressed in a monk’s robes and smoking a cigarette (the theme of the short film was to illustrate how even the most moral among us may have habits or yearnings that do not meet with society’s approval); this man was a smoker "in real life" but did not have any special affinity toward any religious group (or religion, in general) … which is not what passersby may have inferred about him.

Clearly, there can be significant differences between the intentions and perceptions of our identities, whether in the physical or digital worlds (or both).  For me, the most interesting question is which aspects of our digital identities do we want to reveal to others sharing our physical space(s) … and how does such revelation affect the gap between intentions and perceptions?