tuesdaynight

Having just read about Mark’s exploits in Vegas and being reminded about a conversation he and I had, I ended up trawling back through my posts to find the conversation in question.  I think this is what he was talking about.  Funny to see I wrote this all the way back at IIW2005… time flies.

Mark raises the question how hard would it be to “become someone else?”  He claims:

“how over a period of years you could really craft a persona and migrate it to a full blown identity in short order through social engineering, working the system”

Migrating a persona to an identity?  Is that like migrate a 3270 app to .NET?  Seriously though, you can’t migrate a persona to an identity.  You can, however, grow a persona into a legend.  A persona is an episodic, contextually scoped set of assertions.  An avatar.  For this reason alone, I wonder how meaningful CardSpace will be to the typical home user.  There is a decent sized population of people who are comfortable with the concept of avatars.  Your IRC handle, SecondLife name, and MUD login are all avatars.  For these users, presenting an InfoCard here, there and everywhere feels familiar.  However, there is an even larger population of users for whom these concepts are alien.  For these people, they are who they are and it never occurs to them that there is a layer (or three) of abstraction between their butt in their chair and their representation in Amazon, Hotmail, and E-Bay.  Furthermore, the idea that they can “exploit” this abstraction for any number of reasons is even more foreign and strange.  Continue reading "Mark MacAuley in Las Vegas: Personas and Legends"...