Over-exposure

Friend’s of mine always travel with their camera. Extended lenses, polishing cloths and all. That’s a bit too 'camera geek' for me, but I’m aware that I do have an array of image capture devices on me at all times: From my 5mega-pix camera on my N95 to my newly acquired Panosonic camcorda (which for the geeky amongst you DOES ‘talk’ to my imac and mac book successfully, but only as I’ve the latest version of Leopard running).

You could say that such technology has become so well integrated it has morphed as an (expected) extension of various limbs. Attending events (I was at a wedding over the w/e), out and about, and even on nights out, there is always the means and expectation to ‘capture the moment’. The range of techniques employed is intesteing to watch and to take a part in.

Over the w/e wedding guests happily snapped away alongside the professional photographer and all with promises to upload to Flickr, some even had 'specially made' Flickr cards courtesy of Moo (and yes i was one of them!). The other hot topic for conversation was who was going to be tagged on Facebook. So visible were the range of camera’s and phones pointing, focussing and taking shots that by the end of the day potential subjects barely noticed the click and the flash.

The incorporation of the perfect shot and publication on Web 2.0 and SNSs means that images are re-contextualised; tagged, possibly photo-shopped and set out to networked others. In other words individuals are starting to show to others what they have been up to through the various lenses that they carry.

Commentators have called this the ‘information age’, the scale of which represents a new level of social inclusion as snapshots are commonly treated as effective capture of ‘goings on’. It is worth bearing in mind that these also involve the creation of new forms of content, action and opportunity for interaction in a new social world. We all comment on our friends images, and they in turn comment back.

Gone is the anonymity of ‘what I did at the w/e’, in favour of the ‘look at me, look at me!’ social tagging and content sharing of an over-exposure. Or is it?...

Google wants our health

In the 1990s we celebrated the free-reign of a cyberspace. With a freedom to create a ‘new’ persona that stayed online and traversed the technology only world. Today and in the era of Web 2.0 this approach has been replaced by the necessary replication of the ‘real’ person across various digital arenas; from SNSs, blogs, webpages amongst a whole host of other shared content. Now who we say we are has meaning and must reflect a true and trusted identity.

Trust, is an important issue. The latest from the Google giants is the launch of a freely contributed to (typically Google) Google Health platform. As the Dr health of data, with your Google account information about your personal health can be:

• Stored in one place; with notes from doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies
• Used to keep medical practitioners up to date with your health status
• Provide you with health information about healthy issues

And so we’ve reached a point of convergence: From focus on the material hardware of machines and technology to accentuation of software sorted content and information data. In view of this the repositories of information that Google, Facebook, YouTube etc hold, represent a new data materialism that means matter matters. The storage of personal data has become invisible, we choose to volunteer and to contribute snap-shots about ourselves that are stored, seen and processed by others. Consequently we are mostly unaware of what goes on in the ‘big black box’ of the web in terms of our data. The re-configuration of channels of identity information operate as an invisible system of secretiveness, silently running in the background.

Put simply; after Google we do not know what our information does, nor where it is.

But does any of this matter?

We select the types of data and information to share, and invest a level of trust to the sites and people to whom we give access. This means that we can’t just expect information to stay static, it moves and shifts as sites update and other users sift through data. The structures are self-concealing; put a new album on Flickr and where does it go?... And who is looking at it?

Perhaps we are better off unaware of the what and where our data goes and to have faith in the user-friendliness of our social software. Ultimately our data may not be strictly our own, but we have a measure of control with how we contribute and recreate ourselves across the web. And whether Google Health is the new Dr for our healthy needs.

Another version of this post was published at GirlGeekdom

Identity on parade: come ShowYourself!

Its been 24 hours in web 2.0 world and that’s a long time...

And *puff* Oh look another social networking site, another profile to create, another set of passwords, profile tags, user names etc to remember. YUK!

There is on Web 2.0 an ever-increasing array of user platforms, sites, forums etc. that seem to slowly erode away one’s digital identity as profiles attempt to span the social space stratosphere. It is more than easy to get lost, or worse never found ‘out there’. With this in mind creative genius’s have come up with a new piece of techno wizardgery in the guise of a widget called ShowYourself. Basically (after a quick play around) it combines all your profiles that span across the web into one rather fetching widget that you can place on your blog, website, even social network profile to show ‘where’ you may be and in what form. Handy, if a bit fiddly to begin with, suddenly though you can expose yourself on multiple fronts.

Which brings me rather nicely onto my next query, does one want to indicate the multiple possibilities of your identity and where you can be hunted down? One of the reasons that I have numerous accounts in different places is that they are designed for different networks; I would rather my more formal Linkedin contacts did not know, or try to seek out, my more personal Flickr account etc. The complexity here appears to lie with, not only possible identity profiling options, but rather an disquietness about identity management and possible over-disclosure of the self.

In terms of the new widget in its favour it does let one select exactly which profiles to display so you can custom-tailor your possible web exposure.