On Identity, Community, Web 2.0, and the Design of Pligg
Sometimes something will just hit you in the face that you don't realize until a while later.
In reply to a comment (or several comments) I'd made on a post in Pligg, Lis addressed me as "mtt143." This has been one of the most annoying aspects of Pligg: Why are we identified by our Penn State IDs? In our own blogs, we can choose to display our names however we'd like. Most don't change the default FIRST MIDDLE LASTNAME format; some change it to First Lastname, F. Lastname, First M. Lastname, or some variation of it. We could use any of our online handles if we wished, but none of us choose to. But, at the least (and at the risk of sounding complex), in our own blogs we identify ourselves however we identify ourselves. We don't get this option in Pligg.
Is it odd that Pligg--the online version of our CI 597C classroom/community--chooses our identities (okay, labels) for us? Pligg forces us to relate blog posts to a jumble of letters and numbers instead of a name or a face. In our online community, I am mtt143; I'm not Minh-Dan, or even Minh, or that weird Asian girl who causes trouble in class. Just mtt143. I didn't even choose mtt143! I didn't choose this name, these initials, or the fact that I'm the 143rd mtt to get an email account at Penn State.
When reading posts in Pligg, I can look at other writers' IDs and put a name and a face to it. sck (hi Steve), eal (hi Betsy), dmd (hi Donna), ecs (hi Lis), rsw (hi, Becci), . . . . Maybe I'm blessed with a better memory than some, or maybe I just care to identify the author as a person I know rather than as an (seemingly) anonymous contributor to an online community. But, who's to say that same courtesy will be extended to me? Maybe people don't care that Minh wrote that horribly offensive comment. Just that mtt143 person, whoever that is.
I have a friend at Cornell who calls me mtt29 (that's two-nine) to my face. That's just funny, and it's okay, because he in the same breath will call me by my full name (full first, middle, last) name and also by my AIM screen name. And, that's okay. He knows who I am, and I get that. But again, that kind of familiarity is rare, especially now that we've been exposed to these (I believe) limiting Web 2.0 applications and environments. You can know all the details of a person's life, put that to a name and see a photo of a face, but who's really going through the effort of putting it all together? Most people probably won't bother.
Just mtt143.
In reply to a comment (or several comments) I'd made on a post in Pligg, Lis addressed me as "mtt143." This has been one of the most annoying aspects of Pligg: Why are we identified by our Penn State IDs? In our own blogs, we can choose to display our names however we'd like. Most don't change the default FIRST MIDDLE LASTNAME format; some change it to First Lastname, F. Lastname, First M. Lastname, or some variation of it. We could use any of our online handles if we wished, but none of us choose to. But, at the least (and at the risk of sounding complex), in our own blogs we identify ourselves however we identify ourselves. We don't get this option in Pligg.
Is it odd that Pligg--the online version of our CI 597C classroom/community--chooses our identities (okay, labels) for us? Pligg forces us to relate blog posts to a jumble of letters and numbers instead of a name or a face. In our online community, I am mtt143; I'm not Minh-Dan, or even Minh, or that weird Asian girl who causes trouble in class. Just mtt143. I didn't even choose mtt143! I didn't choose this name, these initials, or the fact that I'm the 143rd mtt to get an email account at Penn State.
When reading posts in Pligg, I can look at other writers' IDs and put a name and a face to it. sck (hi Steve), eal (hi Betsy), dmd (hi Donna), ecs (hi Lis), rsw (hi, Becci), . . . . Maybe I'm blessed with a better memory than some, or maybe I just care to identify the author as a person I know rather than as an (seemingly) anonymous contributor to an online community. But, who's to say that same courtesy will be extended to me? Maybe people don't care that Minh wrote that horribly offensive comment. Just that mtt143 person, whoever that is.
I have a friend at Cornell who calls me mtt29 (that's two-nine) to my face. That's just funny, and it's okay, because he in the same breath will call me by my full name (full first, middle, last) name and also by my AIM screen name. And, that's okay. He knows who I am, and I get that. But again, that kind of familiarity is rare, especially now that we've been exposed to these (I believe) limiting Web 2.0 applications and environments. You can know all the details of a person's life, put that to a name and see a photo of a face, but who's really going through the effort of putting it all together? Most people probably won't bother.
Just mtt143.
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