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On the 25th Feb, Creative Cuppa held its 4th meet-up in Group Study room 2.2 of the David Wilson Library. Many thanks to Hao Zhang, Chih-Jung Fan, Amit Chandraker, Li Jun Zhang, Taslim Yakub, Mokhtar Elareshi, and Sarah Cameron for coming and for their active participation in the discussion. We would like to express our special gratitude to Prof. Barrie Gunter for this coming today; his constructive ideas have improved the overall quality of the discussion. Today’s discussion was focused on the topic of “digital identity”, which has become a very important issue to any users of the Internet. Also many thanks to Tony O'Tierney, from the School of Management, who served as the Event-Coordinator for the 4th Meet-Up of Creative Cuppa. Although a little “out-of-plan”, his flexibility to cope with “change” was very impressive.
After a short video clip show, our discussion started with the different personal experiences related to social networking websites. In fact, most people have many different experiences of websites such as Facebook and Twitter, but not everyone has seriously thought about the way in which they identify themselves. Are they just themselves; or do they play a role that is very different from whom they are in a real life? Actually, the latest web technology ( dubbed 'web2.0' ), has indeed further extended the body of a “man”; not only extending the range of their physical activities, but also breaking up and “extending” or “expanding” the effect of their differentiated personalities. Therefore, it is important to understand that “digital identity” would rather be considered as a cognitive system than the segmented facets of self-awareness.
Built upon that, there is another practical concern about “online identity”, which is the avoidance of fake information for identifying people’s online status. People don’t tend to put their real information online for various reasons, for instance, they may want to avoid being monitored by some groups; or they themselves may have something to cover up for certain purposes. However, this has raised a debate on the validity of “digital identity”. As discussed earlier, if digital identity is considered as an extension of man, then fake information has to be taken as one the great challenges to such a practice, because it has surpassed the rationale for the development of online identities. Therefore, the conception of “digital identity” has to be critically examined before it is taken into analysis in research work.
Apart from that, data security also aroused some interest, because people do care about the privacy of their personal information online and they want to make sure that their personal data won’t be used for business or improper purposes. Finally, the discussion was linked to another question; that is whether or not online identity should be considered as an inseparable part of physical persons. In fact, there are some people who achieve fame via their online identity. This may lead to problems with their virtual status being abused by others; therefore, it is really important to stress the relevant concerns when making policies so that the virtual identity can be protected.
Generally, although being affected with more or less unpredictable minor incidents, the meet-up still could be seen as a successful experience because it has provided a valuable opportunity for the interested people to share and to brainstorm on those key issues or main concerns related to the topic of digital, or network, identity. Next time, our discussion will be focused on the topic of online "virtual communities", which could be seen as a continuation of the discussion on network identity, since it examines a collaborative work emerging from the online identities of different people. Again, thanks for all your active participation and wonderful contributions to Creative Cuppa. We’re looking forward to your coming next time!
Video links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BhEj-tI66E (I.D. / self :: the new "real")
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKFK0d2OVJU (online identity)
Creative Cuppa
02/03/2009
http://creativecuppa.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=60675201456
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