Comments on: Identities, personas or what?

By: asimong

asimong — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:18:56 +0000

Helen, just thinking about this quickly, I’d say that if people have a “real” self it is not just one of our personalities, but it is the values that we come to live out across more and more of the different contexts of our different personalities. To achieve this, we need to reflect on the values we live out in the different contexts, and where the values conflict, we need to choose the value that we really believe in, and then adapt our personality in the context with the changed value to adapt to that value change.

I guess we need some examples – you can provide some if you like!

By: helen

helen — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:10:05 +0000

in class we have been discusssing the joharo window where we have different parts of our self, a self we know and everyone knows, a hidden self that only we know about ourself etc its related to self-awareness and feedback we gain from others

the question was if we have different parts/personas that we share to certain others or within different roles in our life, can we be genuine at the same time

what is our real self, if we are a boss, a mum ,a student a lover, a friend etc

By: Simon Grant at JISC CETIS » Persona woe

Simon Grant at JISC CETIS » Persona woe — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:36:36 +0000

[…] contrast, what I have been trying to get at in previous writings (other posts here and here) has been something much more intensely personal. It is the set of typical behaviours of a […]

By: Simon Grant at JISC CETIS » More on the nomenclature of identity/personality

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:32:43 +0000

[…] on 26th July I wrote about this issue. I was at the time sticking out for using the term “identity” to refer to that complex […]

By: asimong

asimong — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 06:20:54 +0000

Yes, I think that’s exactly the problem: personas imply stable underlying identities – the model is like real actors who play many roles in films or plays. But even for real actors, firstly they can create as many digital identities as they like, and secondly they as “actor” may be only one of their personal identities, in a psychological sense. For example, their religious identity may not be easy to reconcile with acting as a profession.

There is, of course, no necessary connection between digital identity multiplicity and personal identity multiplicity: no necessary mapping; though a person could make such a mapping, and it would be obviously meaningful.

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 15:32:26 +0000

Hmm, if you have “personas” but not “multiple identities”, then that rather implies that there is a single, centrally-managed identity. Because in any IT-based discussion of identity, the term means one thing and one thing only – an identifier associated with some credentials. Now, some OpenID servers support multiple personas for a single OpenID – or, to be pedantic, they support multiple attribute sets than can be associated with the identity. However, you still have multiple accounts, some using OpenIDs, and some on a per-service basis, and some in federated schemes (e.g. a Yahoo! ID). So, no matter how much you play with the words, there is no escape from multiple identities.

I know we’ve discussed in the past the extent to which an organisation may ethically deal with anything broader than an identity – when individual engage in a relationship with an organisation, we don’t really expect it to go prying into our financial information, our hobbies, and our previous jobs except to the degree we permit. That is, we don’t necessarily share our other identities with an organisation.

I think in all these discussions its worth bearing in mind that a great many transactions we engage in that involve, currently, “identities”, do not in fact require that anyone is ever actually IDENTIFIED, even in the federated sense. That is, the identity has in fact no required relationship to a specific real human being at all – just the same “someone” who set up the account. Hence the various CAPTCHA tests, which only make sense if you are only bothered that it is *a* human creating an identity.