One of the more controversial words in the identity space is the word that adorns this blog: own. Some pretty heavy hitters think that the idea of owning your identity is absurd. After some fantastic debates with far greater thinkers than me like Jeff Hodges and Gabe Wachob I can certainly see their point. If to own something is to have exclusive control over it, then, particularly in a online world, the word ‘own’ becomes meaningless. However, it also largely renders the word meaningless in most of the senses in which we are happy to use it.

Probably the clearest example of this is homeownership. If we apply the same rigorous standards one could say that I have purchased a house but not that I own it. The mortgage provider does and if I am unable to keep up with my payments, that house can be taken from me. I don’t own my house without the consent of my mortgage provider. Moreover, even if I have fully paid off my house I need planning permission before I can make significant changes to it. My home could be seized in any number of scenarios and I could be turfed out on the street. Yet despite all this, we are happy to say that we own our home, President Bush declared this month to be National Homeowner’s month and appositely talked about how hard his administration was working to help people keep the homes they own.

It’s clear that when we talk about home ownership we aren’t using the level of rigor that we see in the identity space. Instead own becomes shorthand for a set of rights that while unable to live up to the perfect conception of what own means in reality acts as a common point of understanding. ‘I have partnered with a mortgage provider to purchase property, and as long as I keep up my payments am unlikely to lose it in the near future. I have certain rights over reselling and with the appropriate permissions can make significant modifications to it’ becomes ‘I am a homeowner’.

To use another example, nebulous words such as freedom can also prove to be a useful shorthand for a far more complex idea that does not necessarily bear that much relation to the word. Mel Gibson did not ride up and down the field in Braveheart calling for his men to fight for more localised government of the prevailing feudal system, he asked them to fight for freedom. Nor did he take the time to distinguish between positive and negative freedom as undoubtedly this might have had some limiting effect on tactical options with regard to the English cavalry bearing down on them. Almost any usage of the word freedom wiIl be flawed because of the inherent contradictions within. However, that does not mean it is worthless. It can be a rallying cry, a placeholder for a change or a set of rights that might fall far short of true freedom but nevertheless represents a significant step forward. We understand that there is an emotional understanding of the word that has utility, no matter how far it may be from its idealised form.

I think this is where I come out with on ‘own’. I respect the viewpoint of those who shy away from using it and I think that among certain audiences they are right. However, if we wish to engage, inform and unite a wider range of people around the idea that they should have control over certain achievable components of their online identity, then ‘own’ has value as emotional shorthand for getting from here to there. That’s why I’ll continue to tell people that they should own their identity.

Over subsequent posts I want to unpack what ‘own’ might mean in this context and get closer to a bill of rights for those whose primary online identities are currently locked up in walled gardens. We shall see how much trouble I can get into.

Talking Social Network Interop @ GSP East from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.

Today Chris Messina, David Recordon & I took a break while at Graphing Social Patterns, East and chatted about one of our favorite topics:  what to do about all this social data we are generating like crazy.

Mark Sigal, writing on Gigaom, says what’s been on my mind lately in his piece The Social Map is All About Me:

“regardless of where my content and data originate, I have a right to pull this data into MY sandbox, a sandbox where I track my threads, organize my media, filter my views and push my content wherever and however I please. While this position seems to raise a virtual middle finger to almost every service provider’s terms of service, it should not be viewed as heretical.”

Heretical, indeed. It’s quite odd that Mark has to describe this as heretical, even though he’s simply talking about his own content. He uploads a picture on a photo-sharing site, and he wants to be able to share it on even other sites, maybe his blog. Smart services have APIs with which they allow other services to transfer data in and out. Stingy services throttle this ability to try to keep that information on the site, within the confines of the domain.

We need a new frame for discussion surrounding ownership on the web. We need this issue to be less heretical and more commonplace. I think this will happen as more and more services like Flickr, Twitter, Dopplr, and Ma.gnolia open up their content and quietly make awesome services with robust APIs focused on specific activities and social objects, without trying to create the next destination network.