Mark Zuckerberg describes how your Facebook profile acts as a five minute introduction when you meet someone and you share your common demographics such as your name, age, job and interests with them. The Facebook stream represents the next 15 minutes where you slowly get to know someone by seeing what they share and like. Facebook introduces the Timeline as the new heart of the Facebook experience to tell the story of your life by gathering all your stories, all your apps and all your activities in a new place as a new way to express who you are.

Curating your life
Facebook Timeline taps into two big webtrends: Documenting the self and the curation of stories (eg Storify). In ‘Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software‘ I depict a historical account of the documentation of the self from ping messages to personal homepages, to blogs to social network profiles to lifestream platforms. Now Facebook wants to become the new central player for documenting and curating your lifestory. Facebook wants to be the database to store your life. It aims to provide a place that feels like home where you can highlight and curate all your stories to express who you are.

Your life was previously documented on your wall, the News Feed, but it provides a very fleeting type of documentation where old content is only accessible by infinitely scrolling down. Content and activities in the Timeline, on the other hand, are neatly organized per year or filtered by content type. Activities are presented in reports and a summary of what you’ve done is deemed to be more relevant than all things you have done. These reports, or summaries, provide quantified overviews of your activities which may be capitalized on by Facebook.

Timeline is not a new concept, the documentation of the self is reminiscent of the ‘old’ Microsoft MyLifeBits project which in itself is based on Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex:

MylifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. (Microsoft)

Re-centralisation of the self
Whereas MylifeBits documented produced content and aimed to interlink it, the Timeline is a “re-centralisation of the self” (Carolin Gerlitz). It recentralizes all content and activities performed on external content through the Facebook platform using the Open Graph API (Helmond and Gerlitz 2011). While activities for Facebook were previously confined to Liking and Sharing the Timeline opens up for new applications and new activities. A smart move is that Facebook is now re-centralizing all “quantified self” apps through its platform. During the F8 keynote the example of the Social Running app is shown and Facebook will now know how many times a week you run and how far. While quantified self apps are often used to document and evaluate the self in private Facebook will now open up this trend to more public sharing with your friends.

Introduction to my paper on Identity 2.0
Yesterday we talked about the web having technological eras, or periods of the web that have specific providers, software and templates. This is also what I indirectly undertake in my study into the reconfiguration of identity in the era of search engines. By studying different software platforms for presenting the self online through their medium specific qualities we see what Fuller calls “digital subjectivity – that software constructs sensoriums, that each piece of software constructs ways of seeing, knowing and doing in the world that at once contain a model of that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and that also shape it every time it is used” (2003: 19)

The reconfigured relationship between the user, the platform and the search engine is studied from what Manovich calls ‘cultural software,’ a genre of software that is cultural through its use and because it carries atoms of our culture. It is an undertaking that looks at the different software platforms that have been developed over time to allow us to understand how the configuration of the ecology the software is embedded is in has changed with the advent of the search engines. The platforms: the homepage, the blog, the social networking profile, the micro-blog and the lifestream are not presented in a chronological order in order to create a teleological account, rather they are presented in more or less the order in which they came into being. All platforms for presenting the self online still exist, while one may argue that the homepage is slowly disappearing, and some platforms even co-exist in the hands of the user who integrates her Twitter account into her blog.

In general, the Digital Methods Initiative researches society through the online, however, what I aim to do is research online web culture through the online software and devices that shape it. How is this research placed within digital methods? At first it seems an ethnographical account of my Web 2.0 being placed within the studies into identity but what it aims to do is to look at the medium specific qualities of the platforms and determine their web native elements, such as the permalink or the status update, in order to see how these tie up to search-engines. In a first small casestudy, it was shown that platforms relate to each other and that some platforms are closer together than others through their entanglement of structuring natively digital objects such as site feeds and embed codes. The question then is, how to operationalize the relationship between the platforms and their distance (topological).

This paper is based on the Networked book chapter ‘Lifetracing’¹ commissioned by Turbulence. Rewritten for the Digital Methods Initiative mini-conference January 20-22, 2010 at the University of Amsterdam.

Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software.

ABSTRACT: This essay deals with the change of identity on the web as a result of the assemblage of social software platforms, engines and users. It can be stated that major platforms for presenting the self online have developed over time: the homepage, the blog, the social networking profile, the micro-blog and the lifestream. They each have their own specific way for presenting the self online. The advent of the search engine has had a major impact on both the construction and the presentation of the online identity. Search engines not only index the platforms on which identity is performed, but they also organize and construct identity online. They act as a central point where identity performance is indexed. Since identity construction and identity performance have significantly changed with the advent of these engines, identity must be reconsidered. It can be argued that the assembly of platform, engine and user has constructed a new type of identity: Identity 2.0. This type of identity, placed within the period of Web 2.0, is always under construction, never finished, networked, user-generated, distributed and persistent.

Download PDF: Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software.

1. Helmond, Anne. “Lifetracing. The Traces of a Networked Life.” Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art). 2 July 2009. Available online: http://helmond.networkedbook.org/

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Easy embedding of the slideshow thanks to Joost de Valk’s great SlideShare WordPress plugin.

She addressed the general idea of networking online where we constantly have to fill in our profiles. The irony is that when I applied for this conference I received a confirmation e-mail which included the request for my postal address. I kindly asked why they wanted to have my postal address and they answered “so that we can send you a printed invitation next year if you would like.” It is interesting that an institution that organizes a conference that addresses the topic of new cultural networks wants to include me in their old postal network. I declined the offer of printed invitations in the future and replied that I will keep myself up-to-date using one of the many new cultural networks such as upcoming.org or the nettime mailinglist.

Gerritzen stated that creating a profile feels like creating a homepage. This idea is based on the somewhat dated idea of the homepage as the place to build your online identity. I think this idea is no longer maintainable because the homepage was a central place that you had control over. You built your own homepage and thus controlled your own identity. Identity online is no longer a central control issue but identity is now distributed. Your identity is built by your distributed presence on social networks, mailinglists, Google, Flickr, Last.fm etcetera. In the age of the API and the mashup you no longer have complete control over your identity.

Creating profiles equals creating a marketing strategy to promote yourself according to Gerritzen. This can be seen in the case of LinkedIn that revolves around this idea of marketing yourself. Gerritzen even states that nowadays we are all part of the creative industries and that we should all be able to make money. That sounds like a overly optimistic statement to kick off this conference.

My New Cultural Networks Conference pictures are located at Flickr.