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Heather Schlegel VP of Product Management, Debtmarket How WE create I: Post-Human Identity, Privacy and Self-Value Science and technology let you to create the person you want to be. How does the technology we create today enable future selves? What is the impact on identity creation, individual privacy and self-value? Heather Schlegel is a futurist, technologist, and cacophonist. For more than 12 years she has helped build innovative Internet products in Silicon Valley and has more than 50 product launches to her name. Schlegel is currently the head of product development at DebtMarket, a financial start-up in Los Angeles. Her research projects include disruptive technology in financial markets: lending, alternate/virtual currencies and transactions; long-term product adoption for innovative technologies and positive wildcards. Schlegel is primarily known by her online moniker, heathervescent, where she explores the intersection of technology, culture and identity.
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How WE create I
H+ Summit * June 2010Heather Schlegel * heathervescent
My Interest
• We don’t pro-actively create identities• Structures encourage behaviors• Exploration of my personal brand
June 2010 | Humanity Plus 2
The Mass Age
• Marshall McLuhan• Douglas Hofstadter• Jaron Lanier• NY Times
June 2010 | Humanity Plus 3
How I think about this
• The way we create, experience and respond to technology
• Value-sets: And the underlying values encoded in a system
June 2010 | Humanity PlusPhoto Credit: Machine Project
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Who are you?
Always the same person?
June 2010 | Humanity Plus 5
I’m not.
Fragmented (Online) Identities
• Anonymity• Pseudonyms
• When your Identity takes on a life of it’s own?– Success as stagnation– Pigeon-holed– Strange Loops: Living in another’s mind
June 2010 | Humanity PlusPhoto Credit: Viss
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Extending our Identities• Identify Externally
– Brands, Cars, Devices, Objects– Groups: Institutions, Communities, Movements– Music
• Multiple Identities– Private– Anonymous– Alternates: Avatars, Game Role-playing
• Physical modifications – Plastic surgery– Tattooing, Beauty enhancements
• Cognitive enhancers– Attention, focus, “energy”– Research, Training and Drugs
June 2010 | Humanity PlusPhoto Credit: Brazil
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The Doors of Expression
• Second Life• Gaming Worlds• Blogging, Twitter & MySpace• Personal Brands• Facebook ID Lockdown• ID Theft: Single White Female
June 2010 | Humanity Plus 8
June 2010 | Humanity PlusPhoto Credit: Evonne Amoration
Do we get lost? (I get lost)
• Avatars: Embodiment = Immersion• Caught in streams of influence• The Audience Effect• Participation & Motivation• Privacy
June 2010 | Humanity Plus 10
June 2010 | Humanity PlusPhoto Credit: Evonne Amoration
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Self-Value
• What do we end up valuing?• What types of identities are valued?• How does one value self?
June 2010 | Humanity Plus 12
Ownership of our Souls
• Who owns your identity?– Projected– Perception– Remembered
• Which parts are (truly) ours?• Betrayal
“I don’t even see you, I see the mental image of you in my mind.”
“I have conversations with the person you are in my mind.”
June 2010 | Humanity PlusPhoto Credit: Evonne Amoration
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The Truth is Easier
• Real time life tracking & Public Diaries– Blogging (& Life Streaming)– Twitter – Flickr
• Physically – 23 & me– Zeo
• Collective HistoryJune 2010 | Humanity Plus 14
And the point…
• Identity is not created in a vacuum• Iterative, Evolves• The medium is the mæssage is the
distraction.• In the end, I may create WE
June 2010 | Humanity Plus 15
Finally: Who are you?
I – I hardly know, sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several
times since then.- Lewis Carroll m
June 2010 | Humanity PlusPhoto Credit: Jeff Christiansen
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Thank You
Heather Schlegelaka heathervescent, The Purple Tornado
June 2010 | Humanity Plus 17
