Identity: Complexity or opportunity? Depends who is asking the question?

Tuesday proved to be a really interesting day at the VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) day Adriana Lukas organised at the October Gallery in Old Gloucester Road, London.

Some concepts/deployments of VRM-style models got a little air time: pintarget.com (please try it, they'd love your feedback), Paoga's My Sorting Office (which takes the spam out of email and gives you some control over vendors by allowing consumers to set up multiple temporary email accounts through which they can receive pitches from vendors without revealing their own ID.) and I liked BoxedUp's approach which ex FT man Chris Osbourne describes as 'Del.icio.us for products'.

And these are all worthy manifestations of the spirit of vrm.

But I particularly liked Adriana's own grappling with the creation of an infrastructure on which an ecosystem of such manifestations could evolve.

Growing from readily available tools and concepts (RSS, igoogle etc) it raised questions about how multiple personality facets could be shared – in a user-driven way. (Something my white paper on multiple digital identity and the long tail explores a little)

It sounds kind of mad that someone might want to expose facets of their digital identity in the form of 1000s of rss feeds (possibly more) of data about themselves, shared with whom they choose when they choose.

But that's likely because those of us who didn't grow up in the digital age see complexity where digital natives may see the opportunity for self-expression (in a psychological self-deterministic way)

For example,

World 1.0 question: How can I simplify the management of all these multiple identities?

World 2.0 question: Where are the tools that allow me to express all the subtleties of me?

I think Adriana may be on the right track with her infrastructure approach. Build something on which others can express; a fitness landscape for the evolution to begin on. That's where the value will emerge.

And it's kind of the world2.0 solution, isn't it?

I am part of a community, therefore I am: Your identity is co-created

I've often discussed psychological self-determination (who the hell do you think you are?) with Communities Dominate Brands' Alan Moore.
But I can't recall posting about it. Well, today I have an excuse. Al's added a very short video to the blog he shares with co-author Tomi Ahonen. You'll find it HERE
It kind of sums up the notion quite neatly - for those who love their sound bites.

The argument goes something like this: when communities were fixed in location, your identity was created by your relationships within that fixed community. Your identity was equally fixed.

Your identity is as much created by those around you as by yourself.

In a socially-networked world, the creation of your identity becomes a process which is contributed to by more people, more often, and from very varied backgrounds.

The community you exist in shapes your identity from its perspective and from your own.
Your identity may vary from community to community.

If once you were the blacksmith's son and village blacksmith-in-waiting, now you are a huge variety of identities - depending on the community you are interacting with at any one time.
Our identities become increasingly multi-faceted.

Example - on this blog my identity is relatively serious, thoughtful. On facebook... more playful.
I'm displaying a different facet of a complex identity.

The community I feel I am part of when writing this blog joins in the construction of my serious and thoughtful persona on FasterFuture (by your comments, and I guess expectations of a certain consistency).

The community I feel part of on facebook also joins in the construction of my persona there - by the way it acts, by its response to what I do, by the tools it offers me.

The push and pull of the forces forging my identity in all elements of my life are communal. I interact with a community, therefore I am...

Each community creates a different facet of that identity - and in doing so makes a contribution to subtley reshaping the core.

Simple example: Becoming a father changed my personality. I had a new role to play and a new set of relationships - with my daughter, with my wife (now a mother, too) with other fathers, other parents etc etc. Each interaction changed me in small but important ways.
And I believe it made a change at my core.

This may be an extreme and emotionally-loaded example, but I do believe that the co-creation of facets of your personality have more than a superficial impact.

Perhaps this is why 'the edglings' that Stowe Boyd decribes, or Generation-C that Alan and Tomi describe, have a different set of wants - and aren't satisfied by the norms of mass production/media.

Through new mobile, fluid, co-creating communities they have 'found' themselves.
And they have found they want to share in, to be part of, to engage with.

Understanding which facets of personalities you seek to engage with, understanding that you are dealing with personalites created from converged facets... these are the real challenges for those marketing and/or creating social media in 2007.