Identity and the tupperware economy

I have been interviewed by Germany based think tank Trendbuero – organizers of the Trend Days – on digital identity, social advertising and privacy. I hope this time my concept of tupperware economy will be picked up by bloggers ;) I think it’s a nicely ironic summary of what Facebook and the other social networks are trying to achieve. Technology takes us back to the basics almost all the time. Different means, same results.

[...] Identity is increasingly becoming digital, and is therefore managed not only by ourselves but also by others. Are we losing control of who we are?

I am not sure we lost more control. I wonder if it is not simply that we now have more feedback than before. Take a village a 100 years ago. Everybody had an opinion on everybody. One could go to a person in the street and ask “what do you think about him or her?” and get tons of information. Before new technologies, we had very little possibility to know what others were thinking about us. Now we have Facebook compare, hot or not, comments, ratings, we suddenly feel like we are losing control. I wonder if it isn’t simply an old process that has scaled to the global level. And that’s why it suddenly looks out of control.

Link (german version here)