Plato, A Platypus And Identity In The 21st Century (Link List)

Recently, I have been thinking about identity and what it means in the 21st Century. It all started with a good little book called Plato And A Platypus Walk Into A Bar... It is a primer on a number of philosophical concepts using jokes as examples. The book is a lot of fun and very much worth the read. You aren't particularly interested in what I think of it, though. You are just hoping that I will repeat some of the jokes. OK...

A King and his dukes and earls went out for an elk hunt. All of a sudden a peasant broke from cover shouting, "I am not an elk!!" The king took careful aim and shot the man.

"Sire", said a duke, "why did you shoot the man? He said he was not an elk".

"Good Lord", said the king, "I thought he said he was an elk!"

Or this one...

Nurse: "Doctor, doctor! There's an invisible man in the waiting room!"
Doctor: "Tell him I can't see him."

The discussion of existentialism got me thinking about identity. When I think about identity, of course, I always start with Dick Clarence Hardt's speech at the OSCON 2005 Convention. Hardt has fallen on some tough times recently but I still think he does a good job in this speech making the problem of identity in the internet age more accessible to the rest of us.

Then, when I saw this post on the laws of identity on B2fxxx today, I knew I needed to put together a quick link list for those, like me, who find this sort of thing fascinating.

PS. To find out about Plato and the platypus you will have to read the book.

Related Posts:
Intel Official: Expect Less Privacy

Intel Official: Expect Less Privacy (NY Times)

There has been a good bit of talk already about DDNI Donald Kerr's speech regarding changing definitions of privacy. I am not sure I can add much to the debate but I have a couple of observations:

• First, giving up information voluntarily to a site like Facebook is very different than the government looking at your private life without permission. Kerr states, according to the NY Times, "''I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but (also) what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn't empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere.'' Much of what is done on most sites is to our direct benefit; much of what the government would do would be to our indirect benefit and I am not sure that giving up traditional notions of privacy is worth it.

• Second, I think Facebook is a particularly bad example of giving up anonymity. I have just recently become active on Facebook and it seems to me that much of what is happening there is advertisement. Maybe that is too strong but the idea that people present a particular public view of themselves on Facebook rather than their private view of themselves is almost cliche' among users of social networking sites (for a funny but NSFM (Not safe for mom) send up of the lies people tell on MySpace, listen to Pete Miser's "Add Me!").

• Finally, it is interesting to compare notions of identity in cyberspace with notions of privacy. For a really good talk about new notions of identity, see Dick Clarence Hardt's speech about Identity 2.0 at OSCON 05. The speech itself is worth watching if only for the very different style Hardt uses but the content is worth listening to as well.