AUTHOR
Piotr Pawlak

ABSTRACT

Politics marks its presence in the cyberspace very distinctively. A frenzy of blogging has recently set in the political arena. To my mind, it is a relatively new, yet still underestimated, but very promising element of the political show. A blog is an Internet diary, which is based on the World Wide Web, that is one of the most popular web services. In other words, it is a website, the content of which is created by both its author and the Internet users, who enter it. It is the author, who decides (to a smaller or larger extent), what a blog looks like and submits new content with new diary entries (so called posts). The website visitors can also add posts and comment the author’s entries. It is the aim of this paper to prove that, on one hand, blogs take political debates to the next level and, on the other hand, in final calculation this phenomenon is positive for democracy development.

Nevertheless, it must be stated that despite the fact blogs are, at least in theory, private Internet political diaries (after all this is the main purpose behind the web quasi-service), in fact they merely constitute (more and more frequently) elements of sophisticated political game. In a blog you are free to air your opinions, which you would not or could not share in front of a TV camera, in a radio or newspaper interview. This is the domain where politicians could use specific rhetoric. Blogs tend to feature words and characteristics, which are harsh and extremely personal. Their form and style make blogs the most aggressive elements of political discourse. After any unsuccessful clash with another politician (for instance, in a popular TV or radio programme) or an unfavourable press release, it is the blog where the defeated take revenge (in a ruthless and unrefined manner). Furthermore, it is here that a blogger can retaliate easily and without any repercussions whatsoever. There seems to be a certain unwritten rule at work, which says that every blogger can blog back. In reality it means that if you happen to come into harsh criticism (insults, slanders, etc.) at the Internet diary, your rebuttal can take the same form and manner. It appears evident that representatives of various parts of the political arena entered into a certain agreement, by virtue of which they are at liberty to sling mud at one another without any consequences at an Internet website. If in fact this is the case, then in the political show (with the traditional mass media playing the key role) a blog is a crucial valve, thanks to which all problems are kept at bay. Interestingly enough this process is international and common for various cultural circles.

Blogging has undoubtedly become an element of mass culture, as it is fundamental to the World Wide Web, which is one of the most prevalent web services. However, bloggers do not necessarily fit the generally accepted paradigm of mass public. I would rather describe them as politically involved Internet users, who, from the point of view of Internet-related issues investigation, do not match the description of a regular Internet user – a consumer of the symbolic content of the cyberspace. They do not passively browse through popular Internet portals (as it is the case for millions of average users of the global computer network). They are more viewers and participants, who make contributions to the show. Posts submitted by Internet users are saved on a server of a particular blog and can be read at a website, unless they are removed by the author (and, most frequently, an administrator). By rule administrators do not intervene or act upon the content of discussion fora. Under extreme circumstances, they remove posts which violate the accepted rules and regulations or generally approved norms or standards. Hence, administration is not (or at least by definition, should not be) so much about censorship but about elimination of vulgar and widely understood inappropriate posts (among others, advertisements). However, the task is challenging as political discussions always come with extreme emotions. For many it is an opportunity of a lifetime – for the first time in the history of mass media, every participant of the political show can type his mind bluntly and juicily. He no longer has to shout at the top of his voice at a political rally (where additionally he could be pilloried), march in a manifestation (against or in favour of a given cause), leave his home or even an armchair. This entertainment is perfect for all those hungry for political sensations, who stand firmly by their beliefs. The extra perk is that it is all done anonymously. Particularly sly bloggers would even use their neighbours’ names to sign their posts. At this point, the illusion of anonymity will not be elaborated on. Recapitulating, an Internet diary of a public figure constitutes a unique place in the cyberspace, where particular (social or political) affiliations can be easily expressed. Furthermore, it is also a place to observe social moods and collective expectations.

It should be emphasized that the Internet is very different from other mass media. Reporters, rather than politicians, inform us about politicians‘ activities. Hundreds of people come to meet a politician, while thousands come to a rally. Several hundred thousand readers can read about the meeting in a newspaper, while several millions can watch a TV report about it. Traditional media mediate between politicians and the public in the political show. This middleman is required but not always favourable and criticised. By creating an Internet blog, a politician gives up the burdensome mediation service. Whatever he writes at a cyberspace blog directly reaches the public, and the other way round. As a consequence, this can be seen as a specific type of a media show.

This paper analyzes the influence of the Internet on the widely understood political culture. The influence is exerted, among others, by blogs, which are used as tools in political debates (often battles). This subject is a continuation of the problem I took up five years ago at the 2004 Ethicomp conference in Greece in “The direction of evolution of “the political culture” in times of violent expansion of informative techniques”. As a result, this will also be an interesting endeavour to make reference to the statements made by me back then, which pertained to the positive influence of the cutting-edge ICT on the political culture. To support my thesis I analyze blogs of Polish politicians from the 2007 parliamentary elections till now. The stormy character of the Polish political scene should deliver good and interesting arguments. I compare Polish blogging with examples from other countries. I perceive the notion of political culture as Marceli Kosman. I base my understanding of the term “blog” on definition given by Core Doctorow and Grzegorz Mazurek.

REFERENCES

Blood R. (2001).We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture. London

Castells M. (2001). The Internet Galaxy. New York.

Doctorow C., Dornfest R., Johnson J.S., Powers S., Trott B., Trott M.G. (2002). Essential blogging. Sebastopol, CA

Ess C. (2009). Digital Media Ethics. Cambridge, Malden

Hales C.F. (2008). The information society: development perspectives. Rzeszow

Jerzy Wieczorkowski A. (2008). Blog – widziane z fosy. Warszawa

Kosman M. [ed.] (2000). Kultura polityczna w Polsce. Poznan

Mazurek G. (2008). Blogi i wirtualne spolecznosci – wykorzystanie w marketingu. Cracow

Sekula P. (2009). Kultura polityczna a konsolidacja demokracji. Cracow

Wojtaszak, A., Wybranowski D. (2002). Wybrane problemy teorii polityki. Szczecin

AUTHOR
Elin Palm

ABSTRACT

Increasingly, government agencies offer citizens their services online – a development that sometimes is described in terms of a shift to a “paperless government”. Correctly used, it is hoped that e-Government may increase transparency and civic involvement. The EU action plan on e-Government promotes a more efficient and easily accessible digital government. It requires EU Member States to “ensure that by 2010 all citizens, including socially disadvantaged groups, become major beneficiaries of e-Government, and European public administrations deliver public information and services that are more easily accessible and increasingly trusted by the public, through innovative use of ICT, increasing awareness of the benefits of e-Government and improved skills and support for all users” (the “i2010 e-Government Action Plan: Accelerating e-Government in Europe for the Benefit of All”). The extent to which individual member states offer on-line services vary however.

In Sweden, ranked in top on the United Nations’ 2008 e-Government Readiness Index (The Cap Gemini Ernst & Young survey on electronic Public Services in Europe, 2006), a long-standing governmental goal has been to create the “24 hours authority” – an electronic service available 24 hours a day 7 days a week, providing Swedish citizens access to public services and contact with all government authorities and agencies. Although the encompassing e-Government has not been launched as planned, a significant number of governmental services are made available online. Increasingly, Swedish citizens rely on e-services for tax issues, pensions, parents’ allowance and health insurance.

Nevertheless, projects aimed at the establishment of e-Government are typically considered difficult and to include a large amount of risk (Heeks, 2006, Heeks and Stanforth, 2007). Information security issues like confidentiality and reliability make up serious challenges. Most e-services are based on ICT and share the general vulnerabilities of the Internet infrastructure.

The expanding field of on-line governmental service implies that an increasing amount of personal information is collected and transferred via channels that may be difficult to secure from a technical perspective.

Importantly, e-services are beneficial both to service users and service providers and e-Government implies easy access to vital services irrespective of time and location. Using the Internet to apply for sick-leave reimbursement or to declare taxes is obviously efficient and convenient. In particular, it has been emphasized that individuals with impaired mobility may gain substantially from not having to visit a government agency in person and from not having to employ a proxy to conduct these tasks on their behalf. Governmental agencies benefit in terms of enhanced efficiency by saving time on reduced paper work and by allowing for direct access (transparency).

Just like e-services are to the advantage of service providers and service users, both parties are subject to risks. In order to utilize e-services, users typically create online profiles by providing person specific data such as social security number, address, financial and martial status etc and information relevant for the particular service such as reasons for and duration of sick leave. Information in electronic files or registers may be sensitive to the service users and inadequate system security may enable unauthorized users to change or erase the information. It may also prevent government agencies from fulfilling their duties and exercising their services. If information in electronic files or registers are changed or erased by unauthorized users, a government agency’s decision to grant reimbursement for e.g. sick-leave may err if based on incorrect or incomplete information. More to the point, incidents may undermine public trust in the agencies and their services.

The emerging e-service society increases the need for well functioning information security – both system security and security of personal data (Brey in:. Petkovic and Jonker, 2008). That is, data protection requires both robust technical systems to protect the data and awareness of proper and ethically defensible ways of handling the information to be collected and processed. It is crucial to find a proper balance between the social costs and benefits when securing e-governmental services and safeguarding the privacy of citizens. This paper provides an analysis of the meaning and value of “privacy”, “transparency”, “public access to official documents” and “data protection” in relation to online services and e-Government. It explores the issue of balance from an ethical perspective and presents an analysis of attitudes to privacy and data protection among representatives of six Swedish governmental agencies. Ethical aspects of reasonable use and access to and control over personal data are discussed as well as the task of balancing these interests.

REFERENCES

Brey, P., Ethical Aspects of Information Security and Privacy in: Security and Trust in Modern Data Management (eds. M. Petcovic, W. Jonker), Berlin Heidelberg New York: Springer, 2008.

Heeks, R., Implementing and Managing eGovernment – An International text, SAGE, London, 2006.

Heeks, R. and C. Stanforth, “Understanding eGovernment project trajectories from an actor-network perspective”, European Journal of Information Systems, 16, 2007.

The Cap Gemini Ernst & Young survey on electronic Public Services in Europe, 2006 and the “i2010 e-Government Action Plan: Accelerating e-Government in Europe for the Benefit of All” under;
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/eeurope/i2010/docs/benchmarking/online_availability_2006.pdf 2009-07-24

AUTHOR
Ugo Pagallo

ABSTRACT

Ethical issues related to robots are cutting the edge nowadays. It suffices to mention the “Roboethics Roadmap” of the European Robotics Research Roadmap (EURON) from 2007, in which:

• The specificity of robotics is stressed and three “main positions” for roboethics are proposed; namely, disinterested in ethics, interested in short-term ethical questions, and involved with long-term ethical concerns;
• A roboethics taxonomy is presented by distinguishing humanoids, advanced production systems, adaptive robot servants, network and outdoor robotics, health care and life quality robots, military robotics, and edutainment-related robotics);
• The particularity of the problems arisen in each particular field is pointed out: For example, dealing with humanoids, we should tackle the reliability of their internal evaluation systems, the unpredictability of their behavior, the traceability of evaluation and actions procedures, as well as matters of safety and security. While “wrong action can lead to dangerous situations for living beings and the environment, (…) ill-intentioned people [could] modify the robot’s behavior in dangerous and fraudulent ways.” (EURON’s Roboethics Roadmap, 7.1.4)

In order to analyze some of the ethics-related issues of robotics in today’s debate – foremost, liability and agency – this paper is presented in five sections.

First of all, I suggest to adopt a legal perspective: Let aside Leibniz’s seminal remarks on machines and the law, there is in fact a long and well-established tradition on this topic. The “Automaton’s law” was a very popular subject among German scholars in the late 1800s: See for instance Günther’s Das Automatenrecht from 1891, Schiller’s Rechtsverhältnisse des Automen from 1898, and Neumond’s Der Automat from 1899. Hence, this tradition would provide a common framework which represents a good starting point for dealing with robots and ethics. Since “there is no single generally accepted moral theory, and only a few generally accepted morals (…), the legal framework provides a system for understanding agency and responsibility, so we will not need to wait for a final resolution of which moral theory is ‘right’ or what moral agency ‘really is’ in order to begin to address the ethical issues currently facing robotics.” (Asaro 2007, p. 2)

In the second section, I examine a more recent proposal, applying elements of Ancient Roman legislation on slaves to autonomous agents like robots.

Following Andrew Katz (2008), the analogy is really instructive: “Like a slave, an autonomous agent has no rights or duties itself. Like a slave, it is capable of making decisions which will affect the rights (and, in later law) the liability of its master. By facilitating commercial transactions, autonomous agents have the ability to increase market efficiency [via their peculium]. Like a slave, an autonomous agent is capable of doing harm.” (op. cit., p. 3)

In section 3, I stress some flaws of the analogy and, more particularly, of the parallelism between the status of a slave as a ‘thing’ and the opinion that robots are ‘things.’ On one hand, Ancient Roman law is much more complex than what is generally presented by current experts in robotics. On the other hand, the risk of the analogy is an anthropocentric standpoint which falls short in coping with today’s ethics-related issues of robotics. However, the analogy catches one important aspect, in that robots’ behavior should be considered in terms of alternative forms of legal responsibility for others’ behavior (e.g., tort law and vicarious liability in the common law tradition and its counterpart in civil law systems, i.e., objective responsibility).

In section 4, I explain why this new form of liability, pace Asaro, suggest we rethink the traditional legal framework in the light of the current debate in ethics. A good standpoint is offered by Floridi and Sanders’ (2004) remarks on “the morality of artificial agents” so as to properly define the idea of agency and to separate the concerns of morality and responsibility of the agents. Moreover, the specificity of both ethical and legal issues concerning robotics is examined in connection with Bynum’s (2006) general account of the nature of information ethics and the idea that what is good or bad, even in robots’ behavior, can be defined as anything that improves or damages the informational nature of the universe.

The conclusion is that the analogy of Roman slaves should be cautiously used both for legal and ethical reasons: While some scholars (Moravec, 1999) have already suggested a sort of 21st Century Hegelian-like master-slave dialectics, it is important to understand the uniqueness of the problems we are going to face in terms of moral agency and legal responsibility for others’ behavior.

REFERENCES

Asaro, P. (2007), Robots and Responsibility from a Legal Perspective, Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation, Workshop on Roboethics, Rome, April 14, 2007.

Bynum, T. W. (2006), Flourishing Ethics, Ethics and Information Technology, 8, pp. 157-173.

Euron Roboethics Roadmap (2007), available at http://www.roboethics.org/icra2007/contributions/VERUGGIO%20Roboethics%20Roadmap%20Rel.1.2.pdf

Floridi, L., and Sanders, J. W. (2004), On the Morality of Artificial Agents, Minds and Machine, 14, 3, pp. 349-379.

Katz, A. (2008), Intelligent Agents and Internet Commerce in Ancient Rome, Society for Computers and Law, published on line 15.10.08.

Moravec, H. (1999), Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, New York, Oxford University Press.

AUTHOR
Denise Oram

ABSTRACT

We are currently living in an experimental age of technological development. Owing to the exponential growth in the development of new e-technologies and mobile devices, (that is, technology that relies on an infrastructure of electronics and computation for its production and operation) we are experiencing radical changes to our society and generating a major change in human behaviour.

The aim of the paper is to examine different approaches to the problem of the exponential development of e-technologies with a view to increasing informed awareness among all involved practitioners. It highlights problems that systems of ethics promote, concerning the relationships between individuals; that cultural differences need to be reconciled, and that ethics is a highly conceptual field, and has to be mediated through language.

The paper begins with a broad survey of the current relationship between technological progress and its effects on society. This is followed by a review of the history of the relationships between ethics and technological development, showing how the ethical focus has changed over time and in response to major societal concerns.

This paper stresses the importance to take into consideration the perception of ethical issues changing over time and in a given culture. White (1967) was writing at a time when most of those concerned with the imminent environmental crisis were seen as freaks and weirdoes. Now, when no government minister in the U.K. dare make any pronouncement concerning policy without first considering what impact that policy would have on the environment.

The ethical dimension in technological advances is explored, highlighting some major concerns for society particularly focusing on issues of culture, design, the environment, sustainability and human psychological well-being. Ethical issues need to be discussed as part of the process of requirements analysis between developers and producers who may come from different cultural backgrounds which affect their perception of ethical imperatives.

As a contribution to a toolkit of practical mechanisms for addressing sustainability and other ethical issues, this paper proposes a mechanism, the Culturally negotiated ethical triangle. Oram and Headon (2002) proposed this as a framework which would enable discussion between people of different cultural backgrounds and allow different perceptions of the concepts at issue to be mapped on to each other.

The paper focuses on the Culturally negotiated ethical triangle; a tool that can be used by systems engineers and developers, and those responsible for nurturing and educating systems engineers and developers, to facilitate consideration of ethical issues in this context.

It is essential also that we change the culture of the decision-making process whereby an ethical dimension is considered regarding the sustainability of the future development and implementation of new technologies. Skilled negotiators are hard to find. The model can be used as an ethical audit; a basis for negotiation between stakeholders in any decision-making situation. The model can be used for visualising and creating awareness of the issues at stake in the ethical decision-making process. The consideration is to explore the practical application of the proposed model as to the possibilities of its use in the teaching of students to raise awareness of the importance of ethical decision-making with regard to sustainability in the development of new technologies.

Moral and legal responsibility appears to be on the decline, and a change in culture of thought and outlook needs to be instigated in a financially driven world where upgrades and advancements in technology are in demand. Ethical scrutiny is essential if we are to change as a society that is driven by trends, where we need to consider corporate social responsibility and accountability with regards to honesty, obligation and integrity.

Consideration has to be given to social responsibility, time-engagement and issues of sustainability associated with these technologies; ensuring consideration is given to social behaviour towards technology.

It may be argued that even though rights and responsibilities may be proposed and protected directly by supranational bodies such as the European Union (EU), the Council of Europe or the UN, without being filtered through national political administrations, the responsibility for confronting ethical issues falls more and more on the individual. In the event of assessing how the individual is to shoulder this burden, the paper will attempt to analyse the needs of the individual in this respect, and to propose one way in which the individual can be helped.

A major challenge facing society is the lack of structure in the decision-making process pertaining to the design and development of new e-technologies. Following a review of the ways in which ethical concerns may be perceived as affecting the individuals involved, the Culturally negotiated ethical triangle is presented as what is hoped will be a useful tool for all those concerned with negotiated approaches to the design and development of e-technologies.

REFERENCES

Oram, Denise & Headon, Mike. (2002) “Avoiding information systems failure: culturally determined ethical approaches and their practical application in the new economy”, Conference paper, Kaunas University of Technology, published as Inžinerine Ekonomika (Engineering Economics) no. 2 (28), pp. 9-13.

White, L. J. (1967) The historical roots of our ecological crisis. Science, vol. 155, pp. 1203-1207.

AUTHOR
Kiyoshi Murata and Yohko Orito

ABSTRACT

It is alleged that we are now living in “risk society” as a consequence of modernisation or industrial civilisation (Beck, 1992) where “manufactured risk” should be recognised as social concern even though such kind of risk cannot easily be perceived (Giddens, 1999). In this circumstance, a society is intended to be organised in response to risk. In Japan, information and communication technology (ICT) is expected to serve as a key component of policies to deal with risk and to construct a secure and safe society. In fact, policy proposals made by IT Strategic Headquarters emphasise the necessity of establishing the world’s leading secure and safe society using ICT (IT Strategic Headquarters, 2008). They seem to be trying to create complete security and safety in Japan. Private companies also take a proactive stance in the policies. However, are safety and security the supreme values for human beings? In fact, this trial can ironically bring about manufactured risk, but nonetheless they have made little mention of it.

This study attempts to examine what risk is going to be caused by the construction of a secure and safe society using ICT in Japan and why, taking Japanese socio-cultural circumstances surrounding technology and governmental policies into account. Through the examination, the authors would like to consider what Japanese people are going to throw away in return for personal security and safety attained by the government-led deployment of ICT-based information systems. Risk we focus on in this study is invasion of privacy and social sorting inherent in the surveillance society (Lyon, 2003), which is being constructed with multipurpose ICT, and consequent suppression of intellectual freedom including freedom of speech and action.

Most Japanese believed that a peaceful and safe society had been constructed in Japan since the end of World War II in step with Japan’s successful economic growth till the early 1990s.

However, the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo underground system in 1995 and the child murder case in Kobe in 1997, which was called the “sakakibara” case, sowed the seeds of terror or anxiety in people’s minds that the myth of the safe Japanese society had already collapsed.

Repeatedly reported heinous crimes have given Japanese people a realisation of the serious deterioration in the security situation. Indeed, the crime statistics compiled by the National Police Agency show the increasing tendency of the number of violent crime from 2000 to the present and the decreasing tendency of arrest rate from 1996 to 2004 (National Police Agency, 2009). An opinion poll on public security conducted by the Cabinet Office in 2006 shows that 84.3 % of the three thousand respondents feel that Japan’s public security has become worse in these ten years (Cabinet Office, 2007). However, such recognition is not necessarily correct; we can conclude that public security of Japan has not been worse and Japan is one of the safest countries in the world when we peruse statistics regarding crimes in Japan.

In addition to the Japanese people’s feeling of deterioration of public order, the 9.11 terrorist attacks in 2001 gave a significant impact on policies for securing public safety in Japan. Most of litter bins at train and underground stations were removed not to be set time bombs in the bins by terrorists. Latent threat of terrorism has been repeatedly emphasised in government statements as well as in media reports which seem to attempt to promote people’s sense of fear.

Consequently, security camera systems have been installed at train and underground stations, at lifts and entrances of buildings and on streets of city areas. A security camera is called bohan kamera in Japanese which means a camera to prevent occurring crimes, even though any clear evidence of such an effect upon crimes has not been presented. According to the interview with inspectors of the National Police Agency conducted by the authors in 2008, the crime-prevention scheme using high-tech security camera systems have been steadily improved. For example, the security camera system installed in Shinjuku Kabukicho in Tokyo provides police officers with a function of real-time tracking of a crime suspect using video images when an incident happens. In the east exit area of Kawasaki rail station, the high-end security camera which equips the function of detecting abnormal or irregular behaviour using pattern recognition technology will be set up. Installation of these camera systems is hailed by the local residents because they eager security and safety in their cities, and any system, as the inspectors emphasised, equips a privacy-protection function.

The “all in one” IC cards are another technology which enable real-time tracking of individuals’ behaviour and, thus, can contribute to establish security and safety in the public transport. For example, Suica, a prepaid rail pass card with a built-in smart IC chip developed by East Japan Railway Company (JR East) which equips an electronic money function, is used by more than six million people. To each Suica a unique ID number is assigned and in the IC chip variety of individual passenger’s data including information concerning rail service usage and shopping paid by Suica are stored. JR East has already developed the real-time passenger tracking system which, they say, can be used to improve levels of customer service. It goes without saying that this system can function as a crime detection system in conjunction with the security camera systems installed at the rail stations.

Multifunctional, global positioning system (GPS) locator-equipped mobiles, which are popular among Japanese people, can also be used for real-time tracking of individual users’ behaviour. Many motorcars have already been equipped with a car navigation system with GPS, an electronic toll collection (ETC) system and a vehicle video system. In conjunction with the N system (an automatic number plate reader system), these equipments are able to be utilised for real-time tracking of motorcars.

Ordinary Japanese seem rather to hail installation of these traceability systems than to despise due to convenience as well as security and safety they can provide. Behind this attitude Japanese people’s trust in the governments exists. However, this may let them miss manufactured risk the systems can bring about.

REFERENCES

Beck, U. (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage Publications.

Cabinet Office (2007), An Opinion Poll on Public Security, available online at http://www8.cao.go.jp/survey/h18/h18-chian/index.html (in Japanese; accessed on 24/07/09).

Giddens, A. (1999), Runaway World: How Globalisation Is Reshaping Our Lives, London: Profile Books.

IT Strategic Headquarters (2008), Priority Policy Programme 2008, available online at http://www.kantei.go.jp/foreign/policy/it/Program2008.pdf.

Lyon, D. (2003), Surveillance as social sorting: computer codes and mobile bodies, in Lyon, D. (Ed.), Surveillance and Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination, New York: Routledge, pp. 13-30.

National Police Agency (2009), Crime Settings in 2008, available online at http://www.npa.go.jp/toukei/seianki7/h20hanzaizyousei.pdf (in Japanese; accessed on 24/07/09).

AUTHOR
Ananda Mitra

ABSTRACT

Technological advances specifically 1) in the availability of powerful digital machines and 2) the wide-spread penetration of high-speed data connections have allowed for the popularity of numerous social networking sites (SNS) that are leading to significant changes in the way in which people interact with each other and produce their e-identities in the virtual realm. Numerous SNS came (and disappeared) in the latter 1990s and the early 2000s, each providing different kinds of functionality and attracting different levels of following among users. For instance, MySpace was an open site that was popular among a large cross-section of users since it provided unrestricted access to the SNS. On the other hand, the early version of Facebook was restricted to young people in academic institutions and most of the users of Facebook had a priori connections with each other and the SNS was an extension of the real life connection. Other SNS were restricted to specific parts of the World as in the case of Bebo which had a large following in Europe but not in the rest of the World, and Orkut that had an initial following in Brazil, and later in India. The development of SNS was relatively uneven in the early days, but by 2009, the participation in SNS has become commonplace and a large number of people Worldwide have experienced digitally mediated social networking. For example, there was a181% growth of people in the 25 to 34 age range and a 98% growth for people over 35 years old in Facebook membership once it became available to everyone. These numbers demonstrate the growth in a single social networking Web site, but do not shed light on another simultaneous phenomenon where the number of social networking sites is expanding as well. Although there is a dearth of precise counts of the number of social networking Web sites, it is estimated that there are several hundred such Web sites and more are constantly added (Sonnie, 2007). It is inevitable that with such growth, many individuals would be members of multiple social networking groups.

This essay focuses on the way in which individuals produce multiple identities through a discursive process of building a digital presence in SNS. Scholars such as Stuart Hall have suggested that identity is produced via specific narrative and discursive processes where the “identity narratives” become central to the way in which a person can create sense of the self. It is thus possible to create focused identity narratives that offer a specific component of a person’s identity through a specific SNS, reserving other components for other Web sites. As a result the process of identity production becomes problematic when multiple virtual faces are constructed by the same individual operating within the “public” sphere of different social networking Web sites. This offers the opportunity for the production of numerous identity narratives where Goffman’s notion of face becomes elaborated into several layers as the virtual presence distributed across many different SNS.

The fact that millions of people have subscribed to multiple SNS offers the opportunity to examine the ways in which the digital system is altering the way in which identity is produced, maintained and negotiated on and through the digital systems. Understanding this becomes especially important as more people, with fewer former connections, are populating the networks. Simultaneously, a single individual is a member of multiple networks which are all visible to anyone interested in learning about a person. This transparency offers a much more elaborate opportunity of learning about the identity of a person. And those who are curious about a person and those who are creating their identities are both aware of this opportunity and can manipulate the narratives appropriately to manage the composite narrative produced across multiple digital social networks.

The key question thus is: What are the strategies used by people to create multiple narratives across different SNS Web sites? The question is approached using methods of textual analysis as suggested by critical scholars like John Fiske where selected discourses of individuals is analyzed to see specific representational strategies used by the individuals to create multiple identity narratives.

The preliminary findings show that people who have multiple identities deliberately produce specific narrative bits or “narbs” that are tailored for the specific SNS. Most of the digital social networking systems also allow the members to constantly change the narbs. These changes could be in the form of updating personal information, adding new information, or reporting on the status of a person at any time. The outcome of the process of creating dynamic narbs is the slippage from a stable identity narrative. It is difficult to find the seminal narrative about another person if the person is deliberately changing the narbs that become the building block of the narrative. These dynamic narbs all eventually become virtual references to a single real person. Yet the identity narratives of an individual created by different sets of narbs selected from different places in cyberspace could be remarkably different from each other, further complicating the way in which identities are produced and maintained by digital social network systems. The paper discusses some of the possible implications of the process of creating multiple shifting narbs.