Identity and The Independent Web: “[...] Here’s one major architectural pattern I’ve noticed: the emergence of two distinct territories across the web landscape. One I’ll call the “Dependent Web,” the other is its converse: The “Independent Web.”
The Dependent Web is dominated by companies that deliver services, content and advertising based on who that service believes you to be: What you see on these sites “depends” on their proprietary model of your identity, including what you’ve done in the past, what you’re doing right now, what “cohorts” you might fall into based on third- or first-party data and algorithms, and any number of other robust signals.
The Independent Web, for the most part, does not shift its content or services based on who you are. However, in the past few years, a large group of these sites have begun to use Dependent Web algorithms and services to deliver advertising based on who you are. [...]
The dominant platforms of the US web – Facebook, Google, and increasingly Twitter- all have several things in common, but the one that comes first to my mind is their sophisticated ability to track your declarations of intent and interpret them in ways that execute, in the main, two things.
First, they add value to your experience of that service. [...]
Secondly, these services match their model of your identity to an extraordinary machinery of marketing dollars, serving up marketing in much the same way as the service itself. [...]
What happens when the Independent Web starts leveraging the services of the Dependent Web? [...]
If I alight on a post about a cool new mountain bike, for example, I might chose to reveal that I’m a fan of the Blur XC, a bike made by the Santa Cruz company. But I don’t necessarily want that information to presumptively pass to the owner of that site until I read the post and consider the consequences of revealing that data. [...]
Let’s take that last bike scenario and play it out in the “real world.” Instead of alighting on a post on some random web site I’ve stumbled across, let’s say I’m having a coffee at a local bakery, and I overhear a group of guys talking about a bike one of them recently purchased. I don’t know these guys, but I find their conversation (the equivalent of a “post”) engaging, and I lean in. The guys notice me listening, and given they’re talking in a public place, they don’t mind. They check me out, reading me, correctly, as a potential member of their tribe – I look like a biker (tribes can recognize potential members by sight pretty easily). At some point in the conversation – based on whether I feel the group would welcome the interjection, for example – I might decide to reveal that I’ve got a Blur XC. That might get a shrug from the leader of the conversation, or it might lead to a spirited debate about the merits of Santa Cruz bikes versus, say, Marin. That in turn may lead to an invitation to join them on a ride, and a true connection could well be made.
But until I engage, and offer new information, I’m just the dude at the next table who’s interested in what the folks next to me are talking about. In web parlance, I’m a lurker. As I lurk, I might realize the guys at the next table are sort of wankers, and I’m not interested in riding with them. I have the sense that this model of information sharing is, at its core, the way identity in what I’m calling “The Independent Web” should probably work. [...]
I think it’s worth defining a portion of the web as a place where one can visit and be part of a conversation without the data created by that conversation being presumptively sucked into a sophisticated response platform – whether that platform is Google, Blue Kai, Doubleclick, Twitter, or any other scaled web service. Now, I’m all for engaging with that platform, to be sure, but I’m also interested in the parts of society where one can wander about free of identity presumption, a place where one can chose to engage knowing that you are in control of how your identity is presented, and when it is revealed. [...]
I think how we manage these questions will define who we are at a very core level in the coming years. As Lessig has written, code becomes law. It took tens of thousands of years for homo sapiens to develop the elaborate social code which defines how we interact with each other in the real world. I’m fascinated with the question of how we translate that code online.” http://battellemedia.com/archives/2010/10/identity_and_the_independent_web_.php
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admin 14:58 on June 26, 2011 Permalink |
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