Transparent identity, accountability and connectivity

I started this post with the intuitive feeling that the issues of identities, transparency, accountability and connectivity were emergent values related to blogging. The culture of the internet seems to be moving from a preference of anonymity towards the practice of revealing and establishing a consistent, trust-worthy identity. This reversal can be noted by the move towards the building of reputation capital in online communities. With the arrival of blogging, the online users are suddenly given a personal voice in a very transparent way. Blogging is a practice in which the blogger cannot remain anonymous but must clearly identify himself/herself by revealing personal beliefs, viewpoints, passions, preferences, hopes and dreams throughout his/her blogging practice with consistency. This transparency of identity fosters accountability and in turn nurtures connectivity. In other words, as blog readers come to know and identify with a blogger's beliefs, hopes and dreams, the readers learn to trust the viewpoint of the writer and will continue to come back to read that blog that he or she identifies with. When identity is shared in blogging, we have connectivity. A few supporters of how identity is necesarry to blogging can be found with spacewaitress who gives the link to metalfilter and the commenters related to those two posts. Also in mathemagenic's words, "blogging gives me better identity than on-line profiles, cv, and publication". Here, I'm going to do something that was declared not 'correct' in blogging, that is editing my work after it has been posted. Why not? I'm adding here another link to support my argument that a strong identity, especially, 'passion' is necessary in blogging. I would like to point out to Christopher Lydon's audio blogging, in his interview with David Weinberger, in which David strongly emphasizes the place of passion in blogging.



I feel frustrated and have struggled by this attempt of mine to describe and validate the linkage of these issues, but I remain certain and am encouraged that they are emergent values of an increasingly complex internet environment which was brought about by the phenomenum of blogging which I feel are core values of a much larger emerging paradigm. Which brings me to point out that in subsequent blogs, there will probably be more unclear postings which I will struggle with in public because our esteemed Prof. Derrick has asked us to work out on our blogs our thoughts on our course project for presentation and evaluation in the coming month. Well, there's the comfort of Jay Rosen's view that "blogging is about making and changing minds" as Tammy has pointed out.



Discuss