New technology of any sort forces us as a culture to reexamine our assumptions about ourselves and our world. Sometimes those assumptions morph easily between technologies and media, providing a natural transition as the new medium takes its place in our arsenal. Other times, the new medium disrupts things so thoroughly that we scarcely know what we’ve gotten ourselves into until we’re well on our way to restructuring our world around it. It’s almost undebatable at this point that the internet falls into the latter group, transforming so much of the culture, economy, and world view of every sector of society it has touched.

As our integration of the internet into every corner of our lives marches on, there are a number of surprising social effects that have emerged which no one could have predicted beforehand, and which no media before the internet could have provided. It is around these phenomenon where many of the great battles are being fought which will chart our course in the coming years. And one of the most hotly debated at the moment are the issues of privacy and identity, concepts that cut to the core of our ideas about ourselves and how we relate to the world. Ideas of self and others’ perception of that self are so deeply ingrained in our culture that they touch everything from religion and philosophy to pop culture and politics. Because of this, I would posit that the way the internet and surrounding technologies changes our concepts of identity will be one of the most long-lasting cultural effects of the early twenty-first century. Our contribution to history will largely be defined by these choices as their impact ripples out into the rest of our lives.

The discussion around these issues began online, of course, because for a long time the internet only really effected itself. You went to a website, it never came to you (except perhaps through email, but it was still on the same screen as the website). Partially because this world existed apart from everything else - because it was easy to flame someone under one username and then sign in with another, without any adverse effects - identity immediately became an issue. Witness Slashdot’s karma scores and eBay’s reputation points, two early systems to allow people to maintain their anonymity online while being held somewhat accountable for their actions. They both leverage the idea of social capital to maintain community coherence and facilitate trusted transactions (whether those transactions are intellectual or monetary).

Those were early days, before a world of broadband access and social networking sites, and identity could easily be constructed on a transaction-by-transaction basis. There was little reason for your Slashdot karma to impact your eBay seller rating, and, in fact, you might very well not want people to know that you were both IT4ever on Slashdot and LuvU2Nite on Gay.com. As more of our lives have migrated online this concept of separately maintainable identities is becoming increasingly untenable. In fact, I believe the primary impact of the internet on identity will not be to splinter our personalities into a myriad of disparate user IDs, but, rather, to allow us to construct and manage our cohesive identities more explicitly than ever before.

We’re seeing, now, the first generation weaned on information technology come to adulthood, and the assumptions they’re bringing with them are beginning to fundamentally alter the way we think about ourselves. New technologies always take a generation or two to “set” - people who take them for granted always use things differently than people for whom they are novel, and the internet is no exception. The people who have built it are by no means the people who will shape it’s future; teenagers will mature the technology as they themselves reach adulthood.

In a thoughtful and balanced article in New York Magazine, Emily Nussbaum recently made a strong case for a generation gap in privacy. Her main argument is that young people today reveal practically everything about themselves online, meticulously documenting their lives and constructing identities. This is something danah boyd has been talking about for years, a process she refers to as “writing themselves into being”: instead of constructing identity through traditional means - face-to-face activities, fashion, music, etc, teenagers are forming most of their identities online. In many respects, the photos of the party are more important than the party itself, and couples communicate their dedication to each other through public MySpace comments instead of love notes. On the flip side of the equation, the older generations, unaccustomed to anyone but celebrities having so much of a public life, are decrying this identity construction as impetuous and something their children will come to regret. While Nussbaum’s message is not new, it is particularly well articulated, pointing at what will be, I believe, the key to the way identity and privacy will eventually be managed online.

Part of what makes online identity construction so appealing to teenagers is the power it affords them in crafting their world. Teenagers are one of the most disenfranchised groups in our society, often with good reason. But despite society’s best intentions, it is also why being a teenagers is frustrating - you’re smart enough to know what you want, but too young to even attempt to get it. This is part of the equation that shifted identity construction online in the first place. The one area that was not adult-regulated was surely the best place to see who your friends really were, and to express your true self, as well; everything else was regulated, a show to keep the ‘rents from worrying too much. This is not new behavior, by any means, but the lack of internet savvy by older generations up until recently enabled it to flourish online.

Much of the concern over long-term implications about having your every drunken mishap and youthful whimsy recorded and archived will blow over. This is a generational shift, and the younger generation will all be on equal footing; at some point the older generations will realize and accept this. From a privacy perspective, though, this massive trove of public data will evolve the network in new ways. For one, at least some of this information will, actually, be taken private. While there is little concept of shame for youth today, in the beginning stages of this seachange they will need to appeal to their parents’ generation, and it is the youth who will build the tools to granularly control privacy online. My friends will still see everything about me, but my employer won’t, because he just wouldn’t understand.

On the other hand, the vast amount of data available about individuals will make identity verification relatively easy; the more information I put online about myself, the more profiles I link together and which my friends link to, the harder it will be for someone to spoof me. The more information available about me, the more “real” I appear. This is, ironically, the reverse of traditional thinking about identity, in which keeping secrets is the only way to verify identity.

What’s really happening is that the tension between privacy and identity is inverting. Previously, my identity was what I knew about myself, some of which I would allow you to know, too, depending on the relationship I desired with you. Now, identity is becoming based on the public information about me, and being too private means that I don’t exist.

That has several implications: first of all, and most worrisome, it implies that not making something public means it must be bad. This is exactly what the NSA would have us believe, and is a key component of the way the government manipulates the population into giving up privacy rights. Privacy rights are a completely different story, and I’m not arguing at all that we shouldn’t have the right to privacy.

To the contrary, I think this change will give us more control, as managing our public identities will become part of our everyday life. We will never be able to control what others say about us, but we will be able to manage who can access what information that is within our domain in real time, and we will be constantly updating profiles and blogs to counteract any misinformation. As I said, we’re on the brink of both needing and creating these tools, which I fully expect to surface in the next five years. The company that makes this management simple and natural will make a fortune.

I’ve been talking about the internet, of course, but as information technology explodes into the physical world through cell phones, iPods, RFID tags, and ambient informatics systems, increasingly, the internet is less a place to go to and more an integrated part of everyday life. As mobile phones become more powerful, they will likely become the primary interface for today’s pre-teens. And this means, of course, that the issues surrounding privacy and identity online will soon be the issues surrounding privacy and identity everywhere, from customs to the corner bodega, driving the changing issues around privacy and identity in network culture into every corner of our lives.