360DigitalInfluence

Day 2 of TED2010 covered everything from suspended animation in humans to the need for better democratic argument in our society.  What continues to be top of mind, however, are issues of id and identity.  These were touched on in some way by 4chan founder Christopher “moot” Poole, game designer Jan McGonigal, and multiple demos from both Google and MSFT.

4chan is an insanely popular and prolific anonymous imageboard that has no memory or archive - threads are deleted after a few days.  While I don’t know what the causal relationship is, obscenity, porn, and rage run rampant in the environment of anonymity and inpermanence.  Is it a collective online id?  If you could say or post whatever makes you feel good regardless of how it will make you look or impact reputation, who would you be online? Maybe, but its not entirely bad - the community has come together and organized to do everything from protest scientology to using online tools to find and punish a board member who uploaded a video of abusing his cat.  The community even organized to game Time.com’s voting system for 100 most influential people and got their founder a #1 berth. Now, “moot” is afraid that the coming specter of universal online identity will make havens like 4chan an endangered species.

Jane McGonigal from Institute for the Future believes that we are not playing enough online games.  In games, we are allowed to be their best selves  - persistent, resiliant, optimistic, and collaborating with teams to create “epic wins”.  The question becomes how do we take the qualities we exhibit when playing games got 3 Billion hours/week and apply that approach to some of the planet’s biggest problems?  You can read more about her ideas for this on the link above, but maybe a bigger question is, will we ever be able to connect our online and offline selves?  OR, are they already too connected?

Throughout the day, both MSFT and Google gave some very exciting technology demonstrations.  MSFT’s Bing Maps will soon be synching up with geotagged flickr photos so that you can not only zoom in on street level views in an incredibly smooth, quick, exciting way, but you can see user generated images - taken from different angles and at different times, overlaid with this.  Exciting technology, but the likelihood of your whereabouts being tracked, captured, and uploaded into large search engines grows and grows with improvements in capture and integration of these technologies.

So, while 4chan is worried I won’t be able to be anonymous on a message board, in truth, I may not be able to be in a coffee shop 3,000 miles away from home either.  Remember that cat abuser that 4chan board members found and had arrested?  They did it by triangulating the images he uploaded with a MySpace profile and other online data to pinpoint his name and exact location.  So you may want to think carefully about exactly when and where you tap into your id, because you ID is not far behind…