Since we’ve been discussing online identities and other things that have to do with social networking in class this quarter, I found an article by Carolyn Johnson that has to do with yet again, online identities. The article first grabbed my attention because it talked about an “online identity crisis,” where as usually you would just hear about a regular identity crisis. The article posed the question, “Who am I on this website?” which I thought was a valid question to ask. I know that I have multiple passwords and usernames just to fulfill my duties as a UC student, not even counting any other websites I choose to access on my own for pure enjoyment.
The article found on The Boston Globe’s website discussed the efforts by many big companies to synthesize, in a way, multiple log-ons into one universal log-on. Also, many instant messaging accounts can be linked together so that you can talk to someone on a different network. There are digital address books, and sites where you could find out someone’s trustworthiness on craigslist, Ebay, or even dating sites. Everything in the internet age is just scattered everywhere and people just throw out their information to create an account and to fill out a survey.
One term was used throughout the article that I had not heard before: walled gardens. I had to do some online research to see that walled gardens had to do with media content, and it almost means that a company is a monopoly with the way that one company can provide a service. This new idea of tying all digital usernames and passwords into one universal log-on will help break the walls of the so called walled gardens. The article finishes with an analogy; Just as it was mandated that phone customers could take their phone numbers with them to a new provider, because the number was the customers and not the company’s, the personal data belongs to the user, not the service or the website. Like the article says, in the future, “who you know becomes valuable to you and meaningful and accessible to you across any website, application, or device.”
In my opinion, I think that this would save a lot of time and hassle. As I sit down every day to log on to multiple sites and services, I know that atleast once or twice a day, I find myself typing in the wrong password for one of the sites because I have so many different ones and so many different sites to log in to. If what they are aiming to do happened in the near future, it would be a great time saver. The possibilities would be endless if everyone I knew was tied into all one service. Imagine the time you’d save looking for everyone and logging in to a million things 6 times a day!
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/05/05/identity_crisis/?page=2
