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Tuesday, March 08, 2005
What is IdentityAnd what do I come back to? Kim Cameron has finally decided to tackle a topic that should have preceded his Laws of Identity - thedefinition of identity!According to Cameron: A digital identity is a set of claims made by one digital subject about itself or another digital subject. That may well be true, but it's so insipid as to serve as a definition of nothing. Kim goes on to prove this by excerpting others' definitions and alleging that his definition can stretch to cover. I can "claim" many things about myself - I can claim I'm 30 years old, six foot four, blonde, 195 pounds with blue eyes and an engaging smile. Just because I claim it, though, doesn't make it so. And, at bottom, an "identity" needs to be accurate. Even in a single digital context (one instance of a web site, say) an identity also needs to be unique. Accurate and unique - two qualities I think any identity, especially a digital identity, needs to account for. Comments:
I have to agree with Dave... Kim's definition did seem to me to be too weak. I can't claim to have condensed it to anything pithy, but I have certainly devoted some thought to the question "What is Identity?", and I've
posted the results here: http://blogs.sun.com/racingsnake Comments welcome through that blog... Best wishes, Robin
I enjoyed your diss on identity and find you may have sculpted uniqueness with your last sentence. It had no main verb and ended with a preposition.
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