Bringing Janus to Facebook?
Posted by admin on June 25th, 2007
Facebook has exploded within JISC at the moment and immediately brought up the obvious question - do I really want my boss to see photos of the party I was at last Saturday? This can alternatively be phrased ‘what does Facebook offer in a professional or learning context?’.
Facebook recognises this to some extent by allowing a ‘limited profile’ option - but this only allows me to have one type of limit. This is OK for separating professional and social requirements at a very basic level but does not really address the complexity of relationships that we build in our social, working and learning lives.
Ideally I would like to be able to present a different ‘face’ to each each of the groups I am associated with. That doesn’t seem to be much of a stretch and fits in neatly with the discussions we have been having in JISC around Identity Management and its role in relation to user-centric environments.
Most people talk about the problem of us having ‘multiple identities’. I have always disliked this this phrase - I’m fairly sure that I only have one identity…I just choose to interact with people and systems in different ways. In this case, I really have multiple persona and want to express these persona in different ways in my online interactions.
Some of my persona are ‘affiliated’ to organisations (banks, institutions, work, local squash club) and that affiliation determines my behaviour both in terms of how I wish to present myself and in terms of what I am authorised to access or do. In most of these scenarios I present some element or attributes of my ‘real world identity’ (another term I dislike but can’t think of anything more intelligent to use instead).
Other persona I use are purely social and important because I am fully responsible for the management and protection of these persona, which means I have think very carefully about my personal attribute release policy (i.e. what I reveal about myself in these scenarios). A good example of this is my personal blog, which has no discernible relationship with my real world identity at all.
This also ties in neatly with the other problem that is being discussed in many different fora at the moment (including a debate on OpenID on the jisc-middleware-development list) - the difference between social trust and technical trust. I’ll leave that for another time!