My online identity

                For this blog I have been tasked with analyzing a digital life audit I have done a couple weeks ago. With this audit I took note of my online activity and whether I was presenting my “digital self”, “real self”, or both. This was to help us define whether we had separate identities or if they were integrated more than a digital duelist would admit. To satisfy the expectations of this blog I have to answer three questions:

How much of your activity in the digital world is integrated with your material world?
                As far as how much of my online activity is integrated the material world. I would have to say all of it. I don’t lead a second life defined by my use of the internet. I don’t do any roleplaying online that facilitates the creation of another identity, such as with World of Warcraft, Vampires the Masquerade, or Second Life. When I do play games online, I try to customize my character to be me as much as possible, because I consider the character to be me if I had been in that specific situation, rather than me pretending to be a wholly different person altogether. My Facebook, email, and outlets of communication are representations of me in the material world, rather than depicting an alternate self. Because of this I see no line drawn between my online and material selves.

What aspects of your experience in the digital world are uniquely distinct from the physical world? That is, these activities do not connect, integrate, or supplement your physical "off-line" self.

                I would almost say when I am gaming. Often I game with friends that I know in the material world, so the two still integrate. The digital even influences the material in this case, because if I have a friend who is upset that I beat him in a game or disagreed with him about an outcome, he may avoid me in the material world till he calms down. Sometimes I play with people I don’t know, but I don’t normally pretend to be anybody else when I am. I do have a few email accounts that I created of alternate identities, but really these are just inboxes for all my spam to be diverted to. So I guess those inboxes help keep all the junkmail and scams out of my material world.

What did you learn about yourself and how your digital identity relates or intersects with your off-line self?

I already knew my material and digital selves were integrated. If my life were split into two facets, I would be more inclined to say those distinctions are public and private. What I feel I learned is that I separate my private and public identities online as much as I do offline. What I mean is that when I am on Facebook, I only make positive posts and the only times I use Facebook to complain about anything is with very close friends in a private chat. The same friends I would confide to in the material world if we were face to face. Otherwise my Facebook profile is a great representation of my public self. I don’t make it positive because I want people to believe my life is perfect. It results from when I had hard times I would call my dad for advice and eventually he got mad because I only called when I had problems and he wished I would just call when I had some good news to talk about. I did not call him for a while because I could not find anything good to talk about. By only posting the positives on Facebook, I am forced to find the bright side of my life and it reminds me that overall, things are pretty good. So I guess my point is that just like my material world, my digital world has a public me and a private me. Which one is seen depends on whether or not the communication is private. If it is not private, then I assume everybody will see it and I am more careful about what I do or say.

Escaping into a digital world.

For this blog I was tasked with finding something that perpetuates or supports the idea of digital dualism. This turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated, as it appears that more people are becoming aware of how our digital and real selves affect each other.  In fact, when I used “digital self” as a search term it brought back articles on how our digital footprint affects our lives and how we can be more careful. The more I dug around the more I noticed that the most frequent mentions of digital dualism were related digital escapism. Digital escapism is where somebody finds their real life unsatisfactory and tries to build an online persona that embodies what they wish to be. This kind of escapism is most commonly seen in Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games(MMORPG’s), from World of Warcraft to Second Life.

I chose the blog “Virtual vs. Real-Life Identities – Is it Crazy to Choose a Virtual Life?”, by Christian Shire, because of a statement he makes in the end of his writing. He states “virtual worlds will start to legitimately compete with a real world existence”. I think that exemplifies the philosophy of digital dualism better than anything I have found in any other article. In his blog, Christian talks about why people create these avatars for themselves to detach themselves from the real world and how it is harmful to them in real life. The blog also contains an embedded video on the phenomenon of game addiction. 

I have met people who become so obsessed with maintaining their character and participating in their online communities that they neglect their real lives, even to the point that they urinate in soda bottles rather than leave their computer to use the bathroom. I have had friends who would save money that could have bought a car and spent it on a rare mount, something to travel around their virtual land in. These people reinforce the ideas of digital dualism because they want those worlds to be separate in order to give their avatars more importance. Because of this, I am inclined to find the promotion of digital dualism to be kind of dangerous. When people want believe that there is a separate online world, it may be because  they think that they can hide from their problems there and become whatever they wish.

Reference:
Shire, C. (2013, December 28). Virtual vs. Real-Life Identities – Is it Crazy to Choose a Virtual Life? - TroubleBlog. Retrieved October 10, 2015.

Hacker Perspectives on Privacy

     For this blog I have chosen to discuss a research article titled "It Doesn't Have to Be This Way" Hacker Perspectives on Privacy. The goal of this research was to determine how hackers generally feel about privacy and surveillance. It begins by giving information on public perception of hackers and how they are viewed as internet addicted, information junkies, who do not care about privacy in their obsessive thirst for knowledge. The point of the research is to find out how true that belief really is. In order to find this out, the researchers performed a content analysis of the US-based magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. This is a publication that features articles written by hackers and is well recognized and even considered historically significant by the hacker community. The researchers studied the perceptions of privacy that was expressed in the writings found in 41 issues of this journal, spanning a period of just over 10 years, from 2002 to 2012.  They used a theory-based analytical approach to sift through the data and analyze their results.

       They found many themes in their analysis and chose to focus on the four most significant as their results. These themes are dualisms, responsibility to protect privacy, ubiquity of threats to privacy, and the role hackers play to protect privacy. Dualism, being the most prevalent, is about how people or organizations can be seen both as a protector and a threat. This conception is especially regarded toward the government and law enforcement. The government has the responsibility of protecting us, but many hackers show concern about “Big Brother” watching and gathering up information on its citizens.  Next is responsibility, which reflects the attitude of how those who possess data are responsible for this protection. This view also states that if you work somewhere where privacy is being invaded, you are supposed to refuse to take part in it and report on them. The next theme is about the idea that threats to privacy are ubiquitous, or found everywhere. It has been found that many hackers believe that privacy threats are not only abundant, but increasing at an alarming rate. The last theme is about the role hacker’s play in discovering vulnerabilities. This is the idea that hackers make privacy safer by exploiting weaknesses and making them known so they can be fixed. Several other smaller, less significant themes have also been found, but for the purpose of trimming down my blog, I will not mention them.

       Based off the most prevalent themes I would say that hackers view themselves as altruistic protectors and champions of privacy. They all seem to value their own privacy and will protest any invasion they come across. But what is most interesting to me is how they justify their breaches of privacy against others. They do this by saying that you would not have known about the weakness if they had not found it for you and that somebody else would have stumbled across it anyways. This rationalization is strengthened by the belief that attacks are coming nonstop and sooner or later somebody will find your weak spot. I do find myself agreeing with that philosophy myself, given my focus on information security and I do feel that those skilled in the field have an obligation to used their abilities responsibly. But I also feel that if they are intruding on anybody’s privacy without consent, then they are committing a crime and I would not be able to take seriously any claims they might make about doing it as a champion of privacy.

References:
Steinmetz, K. (2015). "It Doesn't Have to Be This Way": Hacker Perspectives on Privacy. Social Justice, 41(3), 29-51.