My recent posts have had something of a common theme to them, as they have in part been musings about the way the online environment forces you either to assume different identities for different audiences, or to bare all in photographs, blogs and forums as you take the same username across different platforms.

In my previous post on Graduate Junction, I noted that it is particularly important to keep your professional life separate from private life, if your existence in the former depends upon the trustworthiness of your voice and character. In my case, I need to keep my academic self distinct from the "Ishmael" self who pseudonymously writes this blog, since the former writes in a considered and carefully research way, whilst the latter often splurges any old rubbish that springs to mind.

And today, the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones exemplifies what happens when you forget to assume the right mask for the right circumstance. Last week, Cellan-Jones wrote a light-hearted post on the BBC Technology blog about Facebook's removal of Scrabulous. Soon after it was published, he received a message from a "friend" on Twitter, asking why he had not mentioned the existence of Wordscraper, the renamed, rebranded but still unlicenced version of Scrabulous. Cellan-Jones replied "cos I couldn't be bothered."

Unlike Facebook, Twitter allows anyone to become a "friend" without your authorisation. Cellan-Jones, in this off-the-cuff comment, let down his guard, forgetting that your online identity and real-life self may not be identical, presenting the same subject to the same circle of friends and readers. A real-life friend, knowing Cellan-Jones has a propensity for sarcasm (I speculate here), might be aware that this is just a throwaway remark, and the sort of brief message Twitter encourages with its 140 character limit. But on the Quaequam Blog (a blog with a name almost as impossible to remember as The Pequod), his interlocutor, James Graham, took Cellan-Jones more seriously, introducing a post about Scrabulous by saying:

When I twittered Rory Cellan-Jones to ask why he didn’t mention Wordscraper in his blog post about Scrabulous, he replied "cos i couldn’t be bothered!" Years from now, when British journalism has finally breathed its last, this phrase will be engraved on its tombstone.

Ignoring the what-rubbish-weather-and-weren't-things-better-before-the-war state of the nation hyperbole (which, so Graham says in his follow-up post, was simply satirical), this is a really interesting case. Although in his follow-up post Graham laments the fact that Cellan-Jones lacks any sense of humour in his "pompous" reply, Cellan-Jones has very acutely used the case to highlight the serious dangers of controlling identity online:

Now I write in a number of voices online - very straight and BBC in news pieces for the website, a rather more relaxed tone for this blog, and a downright shoddy, ungrammatical, and sometimes incoherent voice in places like Twitter. But perhaps I can no longer afford to be quite so careless. There is the option on Twitter to "protect" your updates - in other words to control who can see what you are saying. I haven't yet done that - it seems to go against the spirit of openness - but may need to consider it.

There have been numerous cases in the news recently about data loss, identity theft, phishing scams and the like. It will not, I hope, be too long before along with multiplication and learning how to spell "alcohol," children are also taught about IT security as a matter of course. But, though it is far harder to teach, the ability to control identity, presentation and voice online is also an important one, as this case indicates. Who will be able to teach this soft skill? I call forth the English Literature, Language and Drama teachers. For what is a book or a play, if not the expressions of different characters in a different medium, whose opinions may not be shared by their author, or whose opinions may be shared but presented in a different way? As I see it, the ability to control identity online is essentially a linguistic one; it is no coincidence that I find all the metaphors I invoke when I think about this topic concern fiction: costume, mask, voice and so on. If only we had T.S. Eliot around, showing us how to do the police in different voices!

Labels: identity, James Graham, Literature, Rory Cellan-Jones, Technology

Facebook took off thanks to the sociable Scrabulous addicts at universities in the US and UK, who provided its initial pool of registrants. Facebook is great for staying in touch with friends (and excellent for indoctrinating a generation of virtual stalkers), because you can display your profile in all its aspects: provide a snappy status update, post a blog or note, see how you fit in to your friendship networks, display photos of the night before. But it is precisely because your profile is so accessible and broad that Facebook can reveal your true nature, otherwise hidden behind the mask you present to employers, schools or universities. For this university tutor, for example, it's a great way to find out what your students are really up to. So, Sheila Smith, I do wonder why, if you were too ill to complete your essay on time, you were well enough to be photographed in the local nightclub.


If you want to avoid such exposure, you need to become a dramatic artist, able to control your profile online and display a different costume and face for different readers. In my case, for example, I am conscious that academics may consider my blog here to represent the standard of my academic writing, when actually my posts are often written hastily and clumsily. Hence I author this website and blog under the protective pseudonym of Ishmael, and choose to tell about it only to selected friends and colleagues.


The problem is that many of my fellow postgraduates - not just those I know personally - may be more open-minded and interested in my work; thus keeping it concealed from some academics also means that I may not reach the broader audience of postgraduate readers, and thus the blog cannot become a way for exchanging research ideas which is, potentially, one of its best uses. How, then, can I put my research face out into the world, without having either to display the other hard drinkin' fun lovin' side of my character (as would happen on Facebook) or to conceal myself behind the smokescreen of a pseudonym (as in The Pequod)? Step forward Graduate Junction.


Graduate Junction stems from the concerns of two postgraduates, Esther and Dan, who wanted to provide researchers with way to share research with others, and to host listings of relevant information (conferences, jobs etc.) without being compromised by banner advertising and beery photos. Having recently been treated to a revamp, the site allows postgraduates to post their research profiles, create networks and forums for sharing research in particular disciplines, to publish research blogs, and to post on message boards.


There are also listings of conferences which, being searchable by keyword, are far more workable than Conference Alerts - in the case of the latter, you have to be so careful about what you choose, because you either end up being emailed about loads of irrelevant events, or none at all. Similarly, though jobs.ac.uk provides comprehensive listings, they are almost too complete. I may aspire to be Professor of Modern Literature at Cambridge one day, but for now receiving emails excitingly headed "10 new jobs," all of which turn out to be way beyond my scale, is a bit depressing. I would prefer fewer emails, with jobs that a lowly postdoc like myself might realistically attain. Given that Graduate Junction's audience is solely the postgraduate and new academic community, the jobs listed there should tend to be more relevant.

It's clear, then, that there is a space in the market for a site like Graduate Junction. And - to confess my conflict of interest - as I play a small role on the inside, I know that Esther and Dan are really pushing to develop it in the right way. The comparison with Facebook here is both appropriate and unfortunate. On the one hand, Facebook succeeds because it has a critical mass of users, so that it becomes pretty hard not to sign up to it; if Graduate Junction can attract a substantial proportion of the postgraduate community, there is every reason to believe that it, too, will become an integral part of the postgraduate student's life. I know Esther and Dan are working very hard to publicise the site as widely as possible, and I suspect that this October, when new postgraduates start their courses, will be the vital test - if it garners sufficient support, Graduate Junction will take off; if not, it may simply fade away.

If it does take off, though, it will diverge from Facebook's route in one respect. Facebook has used its social network to hand advertisers their dream markets on a golden platter. Dan and Esther, however, will probably not want to star in any Hollywood movie; they want to produce something that works for the community, rather than using the community to turn them into billionaires. There is no charge for registering, no intrusive banner advertising, and no sense of corporate ownership. The only corporate involvement (and monetary charges) are in listing jobs and conferences in a way which, as I said above, is actually very beneficial to the postgraduate community.

So what, then, is to stop you from signing up right away? Well, it may be that you already have a research profile on your department's web page, contribute to a message board in Google Groups, and blog on your own website. Why should you add yet another online space which you must continually monitor and tinker with? If Graduate Junction gets over the first problem of building a critical mass of users, the corollary issue will be whether it can allow users to synthesise their activities in other online areas under the umbrella of Graduate Junction. Whereas I will not publish this blog feed automatically to Facebook (because I need to keep my anonymity), I would be prepared to let other postgraduates read it, and would be happy to syndicate it to my profile in Graduate Junction. Likewise, I could do with some way of keeping my publication history all in one place, so that when I publish a new paper I do not have to edit my department's web page, online curriculum vitae, and Graduate Junction profile, but can edit just one and syndicate it to the others. This problem of synthesis is a big ask - and an issue for Web 2.0 in general, not just for Graduate Junction. But I have all fingers crossed, and every belief, that Graduate Junction will go some way to solve these problems in the future.

Labels: Graduate Junction, identity, Postgraduate Diary, Technology

The uncanniest thing about email is that whilst it allows us to connect instantly with others across the world, it also makes us into split, fragmented personalities. It all starts with the email address, in which a user is required to assume a new identity, one that sometimes marks their individual dispositions (flirtwithme001, physicsguru999), is occasionally ambiguous (is lovebeatles247 a music fan or an entomologist?) but which more often than not is a numerical hybrid of their usual name which ascribes some inscrutable rank to a person: Joe.bloggs.19, john_doe77. Are there really 18 other Bloggs in the world, average Joe's who were more alert to the advent of the web such that they signed up to email before you did? In the lottery of life, is it good or bad that John has been offered number 77 by some automated algorithm? Finally, there is the affiliation to the email provider. In the real world, my identity is not overtly, publically determined by the company I choose to bank with, or the shop I get my groceries from. With my email address, however, my relationship to Google or Microsoft or AOL is bound to my online identity, tied together by the winding hieroglypic of the @ symbol. Every time I mention my name, I unwittingly promote the corporation.

But, like a dog's collar tag, once assumed an email epithet cannot be shaken off without a struggle. Because choosing and remembering a different one in each circumstance would be impossible, you find yourself signing in to various websites with the same identity. In reality, I can don my academic persona and try to be eloquent when talking to my PhD supervisor, but I like watching football precisely because I am not required to shout encouragement in well-constructed sentences. Online, however, my many voices merge to a single URL, or "sign-in" name. You, reader of The Pequod, may call me Ishmael. But you will also call me so on a football chat forum, an academic blog, and a virtual book group. Whether you will be able to identify my different personalities simply through the tone of my typing is doubtful.

Having said that technology makes each of us schizophrenic even as it connects us to other people, when technology fails it also leaves us more alienated from others than before. Recently, for example, I sold a book via Amazon sellers (again, you may call me Ishmael here), but being away from home at the time I had to issue a refund to the buyer; I also sent an apologetic personal email. I was shocked when, a week later, I received an email demanding to know where the goods were. I explained about the refund, suggested that this would appear on the customer's bank statement next month, and thought and heard nothing more of it. Then, a few days ago, another message arrived, threatening to start complaint proceedings for the non-arrival of the item. Horrified, I replied again, attaching screenshots of my earlier correspondence. I suggested that the customer might like to check through their spam folder to check their software had not incorrectly filtered out my first email. Thus far, I have had no reply, and the effect is thoroughly disconcerting - for I have no way of knowing whether this final email has arrived, let alone been read or understood. Somewhere, sitting on the lines and webs that bind and separate us, may be some sort of digital demon, intercepting our email despatches en route and locking us into a surreality where we misperceive each other. From my customer's point of view, if the emails are not getting through she has every reason to suspect me of being a conman. From my point of view, I have done nothing wrong and my customer's emails are scandellous, even agressive. I don't even know my customer's real name, to look in an address book or find an alternative address: Shirls_038 could be anyone, and thus points to no one. No phone number, no postal address. When eerie disconnects like this arise, you realise how powerless you are when the spirits that surround technology haunt it in times of breakdown. In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream.

By contrast, although something also haunts the physical letter, it is a ghost with a human face. There is that strangely intangible sense of affection embedded in an artefact that has received the human touch; this is what Walter Benjamin described as "the aura of the original" in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production," an essay that seems more prescient with every development of digitisation. In the case of the original letter, I know that someone handled, creased, wrote, licked and sealed this envelope I now hold in my hand. Thought of in this way, is it not odd that opening an envelope requires me to touch the spit of a possible stranger? In what other circumstance is this acceptable rather than repellent? There is only one, and this makes the letter like a subtle kiss, connecting me to the person who sent it in sensual ways.

As Lacan - in one of his more lucid moments - punned, a letter always arrives at its destination. Unlike my email to my customer, shouting into the vacuum of cyberspace, a letter must arrive somewhere, even if that somewhere is a rainy gutter or the dusty corner of a sorting office. Even if it does not reach the one for whom it was destined, it has nevertheless arrived where it stops - perhaps where it was always fated to stop.

And when it stops where it the sender intended it to stop, finding its way to my breakfast table where it lies amidst a debris of cornflakes, having negotiated each of the four or five geographical stages (a country, a town, a street, a house, my name) there is something magical about its quiet, stoical purposiveness. In spite of all the opportunities for it to swerve away from its course, for it to trundle up the wrong motorway on a postal truck, to be diverted by a broken sorting-office conveyor belt, to be snatched from my postman's outstretched hand by a freak gust of wind, in spite of all these opportunities for escape, the letter reached me. And in helping it on its course, whole teams of people have been involved along the way, reading its address and pushing it into ever smaller geographies, funnelling it through countries and cities and streets to end in the narrow slit of my postbox. It has teleology in the very fibres of its paper.

Passing through physical space in this way, the simple fact of a letter, the fact of its arrival, is its own message, even before the envelope is opened and the words themselves read. This is why receiving a letter is almost always pleasurable, in a way email is not: the fact that it was destined for me makes me feel important, like a medieval king who knows he is smiled on by the stars. Someone wanted to reach me so badly, that he or she was prepared to put this flimsy rectangle of paper through the trauma of travel. And because it passes through physical space, as opposed to the encoded bit streams that flit through cyberspace, the surfaces of a letter can be read even without it being opened. I often wonder, when I write, whether someone in a sorting office has noticed how often my letters refer to a small street in Christchurch (home to my grandparents), or how I regularly receive envelopes stamped with the sorting code of parliament (responses to my Amnesty International campaigns). Flitting though it may be, as it passes the eyes of those in a sorting office, the surface of a letter is also a significant message for the person prepared to take note of it.

It is this fact that the medium of the letter is also a message about what might quaintly be called the "human touch" that makes it an apt space on which to create art. I am thinking here of the special form known as mail art or correspondence art, which is, according to the Dictionary of Art

art sent through the post rather than displayed or sold through conventional commercial channels, encompassing a variety of media including postcards, books, images made on photocopying machines or with rubber stamps, postage stamps designed by artists, concrete poetry and other art forms generally considered marginal.

The genre can be traced to Marcel Duchamp, with his postcard project "Rendezvous of 6 February, 1916." But given the contradictions of the cybernetic age, when information flows freely but in an ever less artful, ever more dehumanising way, mail art seems highly appropriate for it both defies the pace of cyberspace whilst enhancing and drawing attention to the sense of individuality intrinsic to a letter. (Having said that, I must now admit that my awareness of art post was first raised through this website, by a reader who sent me some [pictured below] in gratitude for my essay on memory.)


[Cascadia Artpost, Seattle, WA USA]

By virtue of its being produced on the surface of a letter addressed only to me, this is a unique work of art not only in terms of its form (for of course all artworks aim to be unique in this respect) but in terms of its audience which, contrary to the painting destined for the gallery or the modern installation, is potentially just one person, the addressee. Even though it can be photographed and displayed online, the nature of the letter as a physically communicative media ensures that more than most visual art, art post loses something by being reproduced, since the whole aesthetics relies on the spirit of destiny encoded in the fibres of a letter that arrives safely.

On the other hand, though I may be the only viewer who will understand that this is art rather than mere decoration, the fact that on its way to me the envelope will be seen by others can make it into a political space. If I pleasantly imagine that those in the sorting office note the fact that a letter has been sent to me when they read my address, more explicit statements can also be made on the periphery of an envelope. By choosing stamps that make a polemical statement, such as commemorating the Svalbard seed vault or the U.S. military's actions in Fallujah (as my mail artist did), an art post might have an impact on those who deliver it, if only by confusing as to which is the real and which the symbolic stamp and thus forcing someone to pause in their reading of the envelope.

As I was sent a set of stamps for my personal use, I was able yesterday to employ them on some correspondence at the post office. The counter clerk looked quizzically at the stamps - the "Remembering Falluja" set - as if to wonder whether this might be some unexpected conspiracy of a left-wing Post Office. Like some sort of Pynchonesque conspiracy from The Crying of Lot 49, perhaps if enough people take up art post, politics can be made to permeate the whole space of the postal system, information countering the entropy of war. Perhaps this may be fictitious speculation, but if, spookily, the nature of the letter is that it always arrives at its destination, if the letter fails to reach me there will always be the suspicion that some one else, their interest piqued, intercepted it en route. They are the alternative viewer of the art work or political message to whom the letter really wanted to display itself, in all its peacock colours.

And even if art post is a prosaic mode of art, we all understand that licking and pressing a postage stamp is peculiarly satisfying and can so sympathise with the nature of the artist who has decided to formalise this mundane delight. It is the sort of message that flirtwithme001 or physicsguru999 might make with their epithets - the difference being that the message can be changed at any point with a different choice of stamp in a way it cannot be once your online persona has been born into the second life of the web.

Labels: art post, identity, letters, Photography and Art, Technology