Author: JP

In the past, we used location of consumer as part of the proof of identity, and location of producer as part of the process of delivery. What happens if these are no longer held to be true, if Generation M decides that these constraints no longer make sense? What happens if we have to stop “using the tools of an old paradigm to try and solve the problems of the new“, paraphrasing Einstein?

I remember having dinner some months ago with Professor Richard Scase; he spends time looking at social and demographic trends, and painting pictures of what might be. One of his pet tangents was the structure of information we require of people, whether for job applications or credit ratings or whatever. How age and sex and marital status and number of children and time-at-address and time-in-job were meaningful attributes fifty or more years ago, when people tended to live close to where they were born, get married in their early twenties, stay married, have and raise children when they were between 25 and 44, retire at 65 and so on. Low mobility, high job tenure, low divorce rates, one heterosexual partner, and so on.

These things were then used to help predict people’s behaviour. Take views of their “riskiness” in different aspects of their lives, be it health or wealth or even happiness. Make assumptions on their preferences and project their likely buying habits. Put them into neat classifications of socio-economic status. ABC1 and all that jazz. You get the drift.

Until I heard him, I never questioned why we had boxes to tick the way we had them. What the boxes represented. Why they existed.

My bad.

Generation M has changed all that. I’m not sure that “residence” is a meaningful factor in an employment form; how do I classify members of the opensource community? I’m not sure that “income” is a meaningful factor in determining propensity to buy. If that was the case, then someone would have told Steve Jobs “I think … there is a market for maybe five iPod videos”.

Generation M will not sit down and be classified the way we are used to classifying people. They will not be taught the way we are used to teaching people. They will not be hired and employed the way we are used to hiring and employing people. They will not be compensated and rewarded the way we are used to compensating and rewarding people.

Generation M will not use technology the way we are used to doing. For one thing, they have real mobility. Mobility is key. Multitasking is key. Multimedia is key. The three Ms of Generation M.

What we are used to is Assembly Line and McLuhan. Two wonderful dinosaurs. Gone the way of all dinosaurs.

And we have to work out a way of describing identity in a non-deterministic manner. People in Generation M will have n identities at the same time. N jobs at the same time. N residences at the same time. They may choose to converge these things and settle on one in each case. Merge their different identities into one. In fact I think they will. Over time. But what do I know?
The key phrase is They Choose. Not us. And what we build has to recognise that. Not now maybe, but soon.

Something to think about.

Most people I speak to tend to agree that identity, authentication and permissioning are key issues to resolve in the context of how we live and how we conduct business in the 21st century. Much has been written about these issues, much remains to be written and debated. And done.

But in the meantime……..

I thought I’d test my own thinking by removing one basic principle of identity, that of uniqueness, and seeing what happens. It’s not a big leap to take. All you have to do is move from a deterministic model of identity (which yields uniqueness) to a probabilistic one (which doesn’t).

Let’s see how this plays out. Let me throw a few snowballs.

Competing for identity is not new. We have all heard the story about Charlie Chaplin taking part in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition and coming 3rd. The Chaplin Wikipedia article I’ve linked to even mentions it as part of Trivia. [An aside. Try researching this story. You will find that the event is reported as having taken place in San Francisco, in Los Angeles and in Monte Carlo. In keeping with this argument I’ve taken a probabilistic approach to the provenance of the story, and accepted that on balance the San Francisco story has the highest likelihood of being true.]

Identity is currently based around a scarcity model. What happens to our thinking if this were no longer held to be true, and that we had to deal with an abundance model?

Being unsure of identity is not new, at least from an authorship/actorship sense. Can someone earn a degree at University without having some knowledge of the speculation surrounding Homer’s works, or those of the Bard?

Transferring some aspect of identity is not new. Powers of attorney have existed for a very long time, as a legal instrument to transfer some power that is associated with a unique identity. The Wikipedia entry even uses the phrase “in the principal’s name” to describe the power. The use of per pro in signatures has also been around for a long time. When I was young, I was led to believe that if person A copied person B’s signature on a document with the full knowledge and support of person B, this was acceptable. I may be wrong in this, but there is some anecdotal evidence that this is true.

Having a “double” is not new. Chance doppelgangers have been reported since time immemorial, and a number of officially sanctioned ones as well. Without doing any research, I can recall stories about Churchill, Montgomery, even Saddam. Most such doubles were sanctioned by the owner of the identity, with a clear intent to mislead. Officially. On top of that, there appears to be a veritable industry of celebrity lookalikes. [You’re right, I took great pleasure in using the word “veritable” in that sentence.”]

Using “ringers” is not new. Amateur, community and grassroots sports events have been plagued with stories of professionals pretending to be someone else. No visit to the House of Commons in London is complete without your being told of the nefarious attempts made by MPs of old to send hired hands as alternates for the vote, usually because they themselves were too drunk to show up.

Outsourcing of identity is not new. More and more, I hear stories of online gamers paying someone else to pretend to be them for a while, until Level X is reached, or virtual collateral Y has been acquired, or number-of-lives Z. See the New York Times’ story on this late last year.

Having a parallel identity in a virtual world is not new. The BBC recently rented an island on Second Life for a full year, intending to provide a physical/virtual stereo effect for events like concerts. We have already moved beyond relationship to transaction in the virtual world, with real exchange rates for virtual money. Who says you can only have one virtual identity? Cybersquatters move over, the time has come for simultaneous multiple identity environments. [Are we nearing the time when we will have psychiatrists and lawyers operating across this divide?]

I’m not sure what to make of all this. But I don’t belong to Generation M, and I don’t pretend to understand everything that goes on around me. What I can do is try and learn. Even if it means I have to shed the anchors and frames I am used to and comfortable with.
At least part of the kernel for Four Pillars came from my reading Larry Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. His tale about the neighbours in court, one cultivating deadly flowers, the other breeding pedigree dogs. It never sounded far-fetched to me. Thank you Larry.

Have you been following what’s been happening at WWW 2006 in Edinburgh recently? One of my favourite cities, wish I could have been there.

It’s worth checking the site out. Some interesting papers and discussions. Incidentally, there’s a footnote to each paper:

Copyright is held by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2). Distribution of these papers is limited to classroom use, and personal use by others.

Ironic, isn’t it? To see a condition like that placed on research about the web, on the web, relating to a conference attended by Sir Tim Berners-Lee? Oh well.

But I digress. Some interesting papers. Like this one, on Using Annotations in Enterprise Search. The gist of the argument appears to be that intranets are different from the Internet, and that we can use annotation and similar feedback loops to improve the enterprise search experience. Nothing particularly earth-shattering, but worth a read. We can always learn.
I was more intrigued by some of the assertions made in the paper. Examples:

• “….company employees cannot freely create their own Web pages in the intranet”
• “….algorithms based on link structure analysis….do not apply to intranets the same way as they apply to the Internet”
• “….the amount of anchor text, one of the major factors used by Internet search engines….is very limited in intranets”
• “….One such characteristic is the absence of spam in intranets”

I wonder. Don’t blogs and wikis lower the barriers to web page entry? Can’t we improve the quality and quantity of anchor text by using such tools? Sure, I believe that annotation, tagging, feedback loops and collaborative filtering all need to migrate from the world outside to the enterprise. But it’s more than that. All this is not worth doing unless we’ve lowered the barriers to conversation, to publishing, in the first place.

I wonder. Isn’t spam nothing more than an act of commission or omission that clogs up arteries? Everyone understands spam in an e-mail context. Spam exists all over the place in organisations. Yes there is internal e-mail spam as well. There’s “Meeting-Agenda” spam. There’s “Things-that-need-deciding” spam. There’s “Things-that-need-prioritising” spam. Fundamentally there’s spam in every workflow channel; spam covers a multitude of techniques used by professional organisational men to deny service, particularly when it comes to prioritisation or even decision.

I wonder.

Amongst other papers of interest are:

Collaborative exchange of news feeds

Visualising tags over time

Semantic Wikipedia

The impact of online music services on the demand for stars in the music industry

I don’t agree with everything that’s in those papers. In fact, for some of the papers, the disagree bit outweighs the agree bit. But that’s what makes it worth my while, seeing other points of view and figuring out what the differences mean. As Gregory Bateson said about information, it is “a difference that makes a difference”.

I’ve been gently restoring the blog back to the way it used to be. And, while waiting for things to happen, I took a random walk. I read the news today, oh boy. And while I avoided finding out how many holes it took to fill the Albert Hall, I chanced across Bill Thompson’s reference to a Steven Johnson post about an op-ed on “the endangered joys of serendipity“.

Go Bill. Go Steven. Mr McKeen does not know what he’s talking about.

There are many reasons to believe that serendipity is increased, not decreased, as a result of the web. That creativity is imbued with new dimensions and in no way diminished. I can think of many arguments; let me concentrate on just one.

A quote from the excellent Judy Breck book 109 ideas for virtual learning:

The huge shift under way for learning is that the virtual knowledge ecology is not geographical, it is global. It transcends localities and cultures and is available in common to students everywhere, along with anyone else who is interested. The emergence of the virtual knowledge ecology represents a titanic shift from localised learning to a common global knowledge resource.

This is key. Serendipity knows no borders.
An aside. Over forty years ago, Leo Goodman suggested that we get the word Serendipity from Serendip, a corruption of the word Saradip, used in Hindusthani to describe what was then Ceylon. Arthur Clarke then made sure we knew about it.

Serendipity knows no borders. Particularly now we have the web.

Well, it looks like normal service has been restored, to all practical intents and purposes. The community has been fantastic, coming up with rich and varied suggestions as to how I could salvage the blog. A number of you scraped Google caches and sent the salvage on, particularly Chris and Doc. One, Myrto, had a complete set of my posts in Outlook via Newsgator. Some of you, particularly Malc, pointed me at the feedburner cache where the last 73 posts were available. My Mac account had a faithful copy of all comments received for moderation. While Google, Wayback Machine and Feedburner were less than complete, Niall found that Alexa had the complete store.

So there were lots of suggestions, all of them good; lots of routes to take, all of them good, but with varying results and time: particularly in the context of timed and dated posts, integrity of past inbound links, visibility of comments and links and images. Malc, Steve and Tim did the thinking about the best way to do it, and then Tim made it happen. In seconds flat.

Thank you everyone. Particularly Steve and Tim.
As promised, I will share what I learnt, once I have had the chance to think it through. I’ve learnt many things. But the first thing that occurs to me is: Wow. P2P backup? But then I’m weird that way.