Full Circle Associates

Joe McCarthy writes about a cool session at CSCW 2004! I love that the session broke from session convention. Gumption: Representations of Identity: Digital and Physical

CSCW 2004 was a great conference on multiple dimensions (for me); personal highlights include participating in a great workshop, exploring Chicago, co-presenting a paper, co-organizing a panel and being inspired by the closing plenary. I'm going to post separate entries for each of these, starting with the workshop.

The workshop was on 'Representations of Digital Identity', in which we explored a range of issues relating to how people represent themselves in the digital world and the physical world. The organizers -- danah boyd, Michele Chang and Liz Goodman -- used a number of innovative approaches to facilitate the discussion at the workshop that I think made it a particularly engaging experience, and were rather well-suited to the topic(s) we addressed.

We started out randomly selecting handicaps from a handicap bag (danah's hat) to influence our initial presentations of selves (introductions), e.g., blindfolding, plugging ears, no use of pronouns ... I had the unenviable distinction of picking the 'You've been bad. Go stand in the corner while you introduce yourself' handicap. Our intros included name & affiliation, and an instance of when we experienced some disconnect between our perception of a person's digital identity and our perception of their physical identity.

We then were invited to bridge the gap between our own digital and physical representations of selves by writing our email address, domain name or mobile phone number on our foreheads, and study the reactions to these temporary tattoos by those in the room (other workshop participants) and those outside the room (participants of other workshops whom we might encounter during breaks) and even those outside the hotel. "