The Long Tail of Identity
Posted 8/29/2006 10:39:00 AM |
One of the interesting things about designing ClaimID was thinking about all the ways we create identity online. Sure, our Google resume is a big part of our online identity, but what about smaller things like our listening history on Last.fm, or our viewing history on Youtube. All of these things say something about us, and they are all open for interpretation by others.
Lately, I've been spending a ton of time on del.icio.us, checking out the people who bookmarking my posts, or co-bookmarking stuff I've bookmarked. Del.icio.us is one of those services that I wish was more social - I'd love to see complete profiles of the people who use del.icio.us. I imagine there are some really powerful connections to be made amongst fellow researchers who are finding the same links as I am.
Indeed, del.icio.us is slowly and surely integrating a more social experience into their site, but for now we'll all have to make do with what we have. The good news is that what we have is completely fascinating.
Identity on the internet is unique and deeply interesting. When we create our identity online, we have complete control over what is about us. We get to fill out the 15 boxes in Myspace or Facebook or LinkedIn that represent our identity. There's no backchannel, no place where our identity can secretly "spill out" of those boxes.
However, the more we use social services, the more our identity spills out along ancillary trails. Unless you were very dedicated, it would be difficult to create a perfect identity in Last.fm. The Kelly Clarkson mp3's you downloaded are eventually going to creep in to your playlists, and everyone will know you don't listen to Captain Beefheart or avant-garde jazz all the time (self-referential example?). The point is, as services that automatically create pictures of our identity become more heavily used and ingrained in our lives, our level of control over our identity goes down.
How is this long tail? Well, take a Last.fm playlist. If I'm a typical music snob, it will be full of the "right" bands. My core listening will be these right bands, and I will correctly fit into whatever pre-configured notion you have of a music snob. You could pretty much package and wrap my personality, right? Now, scan down that playlist a little, past all the bands that fit the profile of the identity I wish to create. Down at the bottom, there are scattered some guilty pleasures - Kelly Clarkson, Gwen Stefani, etc. If you didn't know me, wouldn't it feel like these small examples told you a lot more than the big concentration of music snob artists at the top? In a sense, the "main chunk" of my playlist is the image I project to the world, where the long tail of my playlist is the revelatory part of my identity, the place in which you can see more about my personality than I intend to show.
This is powerful, but it certainly isn't new. Mark Granovetter wrote an article over twenty years ago about the strength of weak ties, and I feel like this is a perfect transposition of the meaning of his article. Granovetter showed that our weak ties were often the most beneficial - think about the time you relied on someone you didn't know very well to get a job. The tail of our playlists, del.icio.us links, etc are the weak ties of our identity, but they may be the most real, honest and revelatory part of our identity that we share online.
I've come to this conclusion through nothing other than my own ethnography. For the past few months, I've gone about exploring the people who bookmark me, or with me, on del.icio.us. I wanted to know more about these people who find me interesting, and I've largely been able to do that. However, along the way, I also realized that their tagclouds showed me more about them than I'd ever get from a homepage, blog or social network profile.
Here's the experiment: find someone who has bookmarked your work, or who has co-bookmarked with you. Explore their tagcloud from the top to the bottom. At the top will be their "internet identity", more or less. You might see a ton of clustered links to programming websites, or business/marketing blog posts, and so on. As you scale down the tagcloud, and you get into the tags that are used 1 or 2 or 3 times, you start to notice different things. You may see links to a sports team in which the person participates, or a small cluster of links to a hobby or a charity. You might see travel information, or a link to a church or family member's webpage. As the explorer, you have to explicate what is what, but I've found it becomes quite easy to do this as you do it over and over.
I suppose the reason this is so interesting to me is because it feels right. You spend 40 hours a week with your boss, and your boss acts one way. But it is when you go out a few times a year and your boss opens up that you really feel like you can get to know her or him. These brief glimpses into identity say volumes - and its very interesting to see that phenomenon transposed so effectively online. If we are going to protect and manage our own identities, how can we approach these long-tail scenarios? Will we constantly have to protect our identity's long tail?
Permalink |
|
to this post
View blog reactions | Post to
3 Comments: (Post a Comment)
-
At August 29, 2006 3:35 PM,
britta said...
-
that's neat! it seems to work best when a person has a semi-informal tagging system -- too formal (like mine) and you don't get much out of the carefully tagged bottom, but too loose of a structure and there's too much noise at the bottom to find out anything really interesting.
-
At August 29, 2006 3:58 PM,
Fred Stutzman said...
-
I agree completely. Heterogeneity in the tagcloud is pretty much a prerequisite for this to work. Your tags are very neat ;)
-
At August 31, 2006 1:49 AM,
Eric Wahlforss said...
-
Nice post. I just wrote a post on the same subject on my blog. From the post: "My del.icio.us feed is just one facet of my online identity. Tags then, could be though of as facets of this facet. On one interpretation, the most common tags in my cloud show what community I belong to, whereas the tail of niche tags convey my distinct identity."
