Table Of Content

Infoselves Infoselves The Value of Online Identity Demetra Garbașevschi, PhD National University of Political Studies and Public Administration Bucharest, Romania This edition first published 2021 © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Demetra Garbașevschi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA Editorial Office 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. 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Title: Infoselves: the value of online identity / Demetra Garbaşevschi. Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020042800 (print) | LCCN 2020042801 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119642152 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119642282 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119642312 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119642268 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Online identities. Classification: LCC HM851 .G349 2021 (print) | LCC HM851 (ebook) | DDC 302.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042800 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042801 Cover image: ©Andreea Macri Cover design: Wiley Set in 9.5/12.5 STIX Two Text by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Filip vii Contents Introduction: A Moment in Time and Our Self-Identity Dilemma 1 Chapter Overview 9 References 11 1 Identity and the Value of Self-Commodification 13 1.1 “It’s Complicated” 13 1.2 The Identity of Identity 14 1.3 The Logic of Self-Commodification 23 1.4 A Brief History of Online Identity 36 1.5 Identity Through-the-Line 47 References 47 2 The Datafied Identity and Latent Self-Commodification 53 2.1 The Internet of Us 53 2.2 The Digital Context of Identity Building 55 2.3 The New Nature of Identity 71 2.4 The Identity Economy 79 2.5 Datafied, Commodified 85 References 86 3 The Rise of Assertive Self-Commodification 91 3.1 Two Sides to Every Story 91 3.2 The Self as a Branded Commodity 92 3.3 The Business of Running the Self 111 3.4 Self-Branding, Influencership, and Authenticity 123 3.5 The Transformative Power of Personal Branding 126 References 127 Infoselves. Demetra Garbașevschi, PhD © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN: 9781119642312 viii Contents 4 Researching Online Identity 134 4.1 Lessons From an Unexpected Social Experiment 134 4.2 Why Investigate? 138 4.3 From Zero to Theory: A Grounded Theory Approach 149 4.4 Quantifying Online Identity 158 4.5 As Long as We Know … 173 References 174 Conclusion: Managing Infoselves 179 References 174 Index 186 1 Introduction A Moment in Time and Our Self-Identity Dilemma Over the course of our lives, we experience moments that have the power to bring us sudden clarity and insight over aspects of our lives that we had misun- derstood, misinterpreted, or simply failed to notice. As a global society, we are equally exposed to moments of collective revelation that fracture the status quo, opening new perspectives and courses of action. These are not necessarily moments of historical magnitude and can be as mundane as the last day of April 2019. It was the day of the Facebook F8 developer conference, an event dedicated to tech creators and consumers, where the company usually introduces its lat- est technological updates, pitching product novelties or proprietary tools to reaffirm its position as leader and innovator. The edition of 2019 announced itself to be remarkably different. Facebook had been under a long siege follow- ing the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Since the reveal of Facebook’s part in one of the biggest political campaign schemes of our times, the accusations toward the company had been cascading. In retrospect, the known offences fell under at least three categories. First, there were the unintended errors in personal data handling. Various bugs allowed the hacking of 30 million accounts in September 2018 or the open availability of the private photos of almost seven million users to third-party developers in December 2018 (Lapowsky 2018). Then, there was the intentional third-party data sharing. In December 2018, Facebook’s alleged secret deals with over one hundred and fifty major compa- nies, among which Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix, were made public. Under these contracts, Facebook was deceitfully unlocking the private data of users for its partners’ use (Dance et al. 2018). Finally, there was the lenience towards the use of the platform, allowing for the spread of fake news, hate speech, or the congregation of individuals and groups with a shady agenda, leading to Infoselves: The Value of Online Identity, First Edition. Demetra Garbașevschi. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Infoselves. Demetra Garbașevschi, PhD © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN: 9781119642312 2 Introduction tragedies such as the violent street riots targeting Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (Lapowsky 2018). The company’s image had been suffering hit after hit, culminating in Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before US Congress. In 14 years since the creation of Facebook – the online social network that changed the way individuals interact and engage in social relationships worldwide – this was the first significant attempt to define and attribute accountability. Zuckerberg’s unprecedented testimony was interpreted in many ways at the time. What is nevertheless visible to anyone watching the recording on YouTube is that it evokes both humanistic intentions and unsettling acts of power. By F8, the list of Facebook’s known offences had become so long and so grim, causing disruptions to the company’s financial indicators, that amends were vital. Mark Zuckerberg chose to play a risky card, one he had recently been toying with. In his keynote address on the first day of the F8 conference, he promised to completely rewire Facebook around the very thing it was accused of lacking: privacy. A new commitment (a private future for its users) and a poetical claim (“privacy gives us the freedom to be ourselves”) pointed to Facebook’s rewritten mantra. No matter if we choose to believe or disbelieve Zuckerberg’s announce- ment regarding the intention to redefine his company around the value of privacy, we cannot ignore the historical significance of the moment. Facebook’s leader was publicly cornered into an unprecedented move; his was the only possible response to appease (even if temporarily) the snowball effect of recent revelations. In many ways, affirming the new objective of Facebook legitimized a cultural tension that had been building up around the idea of privacy in the age of hyperconnectivity, to the point of transform- ing privacy into a societal turning point. Two explanations seem necessary here. On the one hand, it should be clarified that we are referring to informational privacy – the “freedom from informational interference or intrusion, achieved thanks to a restriction on facts … that are unknown or unknowable” about someone (Floridi 2014a, p. 103). On the other hand, we should not forget that privacy is a social construct, like freedom, justice, or power. As such, it can be understood differently by different people, in different cir- cumstances. In a post-Internet society, it is logical to assume that ideas and expectations of informational privacy have changed from those we held before our collective datafication. Digital technologies of connectivity can be deployed to both decrease and increase informational friction, making personal information more available or less so (depending on knowledge and intent), and therefore both eroding and enhancing informational privacy (2014a). The cultural tension mentioned earlier is the result of our failure to project the consequences of this dual role. Our frontstage experience with being empowered to exert certain levels of control over our personal Introduction 3 information online has prevented us from observing the systematic informational intrusion that unfolded backstage. Since the emergence of social media, users have chosen to share information about themselves in an environment that they knew little about. It was not unreasonable to assume their personal data belonged to them, or at least that it was treated with care since, through their structural organization, platforms gave the impression of a controlled type of sharing. Users did not spend too much of their time questioning this assumption. The reality we have been confronted with in recent years is that we could not have been more wrong. Once released online, our personal information is no longer ours. What is more, our data does not consist solely of the information we have historically uploaded and, theoretically, have the option to control. Online, we make hun- dreds of choices every day that speak about who we are. The data behind these choices is transparent to the platforms we interact on but remains invisible to us. The commercial system set in place by the Internet’s key players has benefited abundantly from this loophole, while we have had no knowledge about how our personal information was collected, interpreted, or repurposed. Connecting online personal information to offline real individuals has become the founding principle of a new economic system: the identity economy, allowing for the commodification of identity at a scale never encountered before. The mass harvesting of personal information online was possible through a methodical erosion of our informational privacy. Not only have the Cambridge Analytica and similar reveals altered our collective experience of privacy (we now, for example, expect constant surveillance online), but they have also pointed out that an erosion of informational privacy can be per- ceived as a direct attack on our self-identity, as our online identities are unquestionably constituted by our information. While we benefited from legal frameworks protecting our identities in the real world, the territory of our online identities represented, until recently, a vast and unchartered gray area. The need to create effective regulation to safe- guard our identities in the online environment became increasingly pressing once mass claims to our online identities made by various entities were unde- niably exposed. In 2012, the European Union (EU) Commission was assem- bling a think tank and research group called the “Onlife Initiative.” Its members, reputed thinkers of our time, had the mission to advise the EU in the formulation of its digital strategy, assessing the impact of information and communication technologies on individuals and society and setting the ground for future policy. The product of this collective effort, synthesized in a docu- ment titled “Onlife Manifesto” (Floridi 2014b), pointed to our irreversible digital transformation. The word “onlife” itself, a term coined by Luciano Floridi (2011), is revealing of the way information and communication technologies