iWeb 2.0

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For a while now it has seemed to me that the web has reached a plateau, that something more significant is possible and needed, than the endless parade of social networks and disassociated widgets and utilities. What I’m talking about is a purpose, a reason to be there, something that means that 55 profiles and accounts on different services and websites all jointly represent you. Not because it is necessary to link it all, but simply because the opportunity presents itself to achieve something by doing so.

Integration is coming, of course. Open ID sees almost all the major internet content providers getting into bed to supply a single way to log on to their respective services. A small step qualitatively, but significant with those backers.

Yet this is not the true nature of what I’m getting at, which is that the online presence must in some way come to represent who you really are – an avatar of yourself in the digital empyrean. It starts with the same motivation as Open ID – one can only remember so much personal info before a bootstrap optimisation is necessary. Then beyond that there comes a point when you can’t really remember every way in which you have represented yourself online over the years, and control over both access to, and knowledge of, your online presence is desired. Remember, aside from organisational entropy, nothing on the internet ever goes away.

Finally, (perhaps only finally in my limited vision), there is control of where you want to go, and what you want to know. The internet is a big place, and it would be nice to be able to link your online representation to the spotlight of your directed attention every time you log on, the better to swim in waters that are relevant and/or hospitable.

Perhaps it is my feeling of disenfranchisement as a citizen that prompts these thoughts, for the power of voting seems to be to have been annulled by the hydra of capitalistic democracy and consequent lack real choice between candidates. That is a whole other topic, but certainly I feel far more likely to have my voice heard by somebody online, than I do on a ballot.

So the representation I speak of is both a new and age-old concept. The phrase ‘citizen of the net’ has been bandied about for years, but it’s far from a reality and the infrastructure would be need to be evolved dramatically. To start with, and to return to where I started, is the melding of all those piecemeal representations that we call our profiles – and then comes real self-knowledge, and real control, as all the pieces of our online selves cohere in our own vision.

At the logical conclusion of this way of thinking, lies the representation of the impact your life has on the finite world in which you live. If we are no longer able to count the economic cost of environmental impact or natural resource consumption as zero, then any true representation of ourselves in any media must carry that caveat: ‘What I am as a social being, is accompanied by this tally of my impact on the world’.

And the value of that, is that with self-knowledge comes self-control. But this again, is another topic.

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