Big Data and the Emergence of System Identities

• In Event: 464 - Section on Communication and Information Technologies Paper Session. Open Topic on Communication, Media, and/or Information Technologies

Abstract

While social identity is an identity continually renegotiated through linguistic interactions and social performances, bureaucratic identity—glimpsed in passports, driver’s licenses, and other identity cards—is a construction of fixed personhood for the purposes of modern organizational needs, ensuring that the member has remained essentially the same despite changes in personality, body, and behavior. With the spread of information technologies, however, there has emerged a new variation of identity—system identity, which represents persons as dynamically forming clouds of data. While system identities can serve the bureaucratic need for identifying members, their role far surpasses the functional necessities of inclusion and exclusion. This paper highlights the importance of this differentiation, and charts its latest development.

Authors

• Aneesh Aneesh, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

• Matthew McCarthy, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee