There’s something strange going on whenever
It seems to me that we used to ask ourselves whether the person behind the screen name was really who they are, but now we seem to be questioning whether they’re there at all or even human!
For example: the death switch project checks if you’re not dead by sending a subscriber an invitation to answer back with a secret password. Then there’s the Superconsumer a computer that buys and sells things on ebay independantly.
Is this the future of identity then? Is it that it’s not about the honesty of people online but actually if they’re even there at all to begin with?
Creepy…
Well, from my experience the main question these days tends to be: how do I reveal and hide different aspects of my identity online? Flickr begins to do this in a very primitive way (friends, family, contacts, everyone else), but MySpace has no way of dividing and limiting information flow.
The Death Switch Project sounds suspiciously like a take on On Kawara’s postcard project (I don’t think it’s titled), where he would intermittently send telegrams to friends saying “I am still alive”. There’s a good essay about his work here:
http://www.diacenter.org/exhibs_b/kawara/essay.html
But I suppose it also sounds like the button thingy in LOST (which I don’t watch).
And I guess the biggest question is: aren’t the functions of a deathswitch WRT message delivery simply that of a will? The only difference being immediate delivery of the contents (and the lack of legal standing).