I’m still digesting Reboot (let alone foo camp). One thing that stuck in my mind was the talk by TL Taylor on Play – notes: in particular the fact that many players in MMORPGs have either more than one account, or let many users log in as that one person. It’s something I’ve seen with phones – it’s always thought that it’s one person, one phone, one account, but these days people at one end have multiple phones, and at the other pool phones within a family or social group.
Online we’re stuck with the one person one account view. Often this is the only use that is allowed (picking just one set of T&Cs – that of Gaydar: 6.1.11 We require that you do not have more than one account at any time). However, as has been implied, this isn’t how people think or act.
Normally the reason for the one account rule is to prevent trolling. Standard troll practice is to create many accounts and have conversations between themselves, wars or gang up against unwitting users. Another, which I suspect is the reason for Gaydar’s T&Cs, is that free accounts may have a finite set of resources, which of course can be multiplied by the use of multiple accounts.
However, we may be stifling how people actually want to use these things. There are very few people who have just one outward view on the world – for example, a work/family split is common, if not more complex personal arrangements (these days I like an easy life, so I tend towards a single persona and account on services). An an example – I’ve seen a couple have a separate delicious account for shared activities. People use accounts to separate contexts and imbue meaning through the use of different accounts – it isn’t just wanting to show different parts of their life to different people.
How do sites cope with this? Terribly. The one person one account trope is enforced through technology. “Remember me?”, never “Remember this account?”. It strikes me that there’s probably interest in sites that handle this better, or even plugins or other services that can handle seamless user switching.
Remember another.com? It looks like it’s still going. The service is predicated on giving people as many disposable identities as they want. I think Steve Bowbrick, who set it up, was inspired in part by Sherry Turkle’s research in Life on the Screen. I’ve always thought it a bit odd that more companies haven’t cottoned on to this.
— Nigel Shardlow 6.09.06 #
Doing music the indie way, MySpace would be a great place for me to promote my works. One of the main reasons for not getting around to using MySpace is the utter impracticality of maintaining different profiles.. which I would need for the different artist names I’m using.
hm. good point. i’ll try an remember this for later, but feel free to call me on it if i forget.
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