Online status and identity: five concepts explained

Every social service issues a currency. It is not money but standing, denominated in counts, marks and placements. It can be spent only inside the service that issued it.

Online status and identity often describe what people call online identity: the accumulated balance of service-issued currency attached to a name. Most of what people call status is other people seeing that balance.

Here are five concepts that explain how it works: service-issued signals, nonportable status, persona, pseudonymity, and context collapse, including the loss of control when attention arrives uninvited.

What to take away

The concepts outlast any single service's rules. What a particular mark means, and how it is awarded, changes with the service's policy, so the table below describes what each type of signal measures rather than one platform's current criteria.

The signals, and what each one counts

Across the table, every signal is a proxy. Facebook friend or follower counts, Instagram follower and engagement counts and verification badges, Reddit karma, and placement in Facebook or Instagram feeds show the different forms these proxies take. The issuer defines the proxy, and the issuer can and does change that definition.

A count meant one thing one year, then something else after an unannounced policy change. The history of the count is unrecoverable. That defeats most attempts to build a timeline of these services.

Currency that cannot be exported

Standing earned in one service does not transfer. A large following on one service, a high reputation in one community, a long-standing handle: none of it is recognized anywhere else, and the person who built it starts again from nothing when they move.

This is not an accident. Non-portable status is the strongest reason people stay on a service that has gotten worse for them, and every service knows it.

The cost of leaving is not lost content, which can usually be exported, but lost standing, which cannot.

Data protection law draws the same line. Under the UK GDPR, as the UK Information Commissioner's Office explains it, the right to data portability lets people obtain and reuse their personal data across different services, but it only applies to information an individual has provided to a controller. Data a service creates from that information, such as a user profile, is not within the scope of the right. Nor does the right oblige a service to keep systems technically compatible with those of other organisations. Your posts and photos can leave with you; the standing the service computed from them stays behind. The lock-in works the same way in smaller rooms, one of the trends in early social networks that a revival cannot simply undo.

The consequence for anyone reading status signals is that they describe a position inside one economy. A person with no visible standing on one service may be central to another, and the size of a count says nothing about the size of the person.

Person and persona

Every account is a persona: a version of a person compressed for an audience. This holds for real names as much as invented ones, because selection, not the name, makes a persona.

Nobody posts everything. What they post is chosen for who they think is reading, and from outside, that chosen subset is the identity.

The gap grows with audience size. A small, known audience lets a persona stay close to the person, because that audience knows the rest.

A large, unknown audience forces the persona to be legible to strangers: simpler, more consistent, more performed. People with large audiences are not more fake than those with small ones. They are more compressed, because compression is what a large audience requires.

Pseudonymity is a stable invented name. It is often seen as the opposite of authentic identity, but it is closer to the opposite of context collapse. It lets one person hold different personas for different audiences without those audiences meeting. Google+'s legal-name policy prompted a controversy dubbed the nymwars controversy.

Most long-running communities described under internet communities were built on it. Members were as accountable to each other as any real-named group, because the name had a history, even if it was not a passport name.

When the audiences meet

Context collapse describes speaking to many audiences at once with no way to address them separately. Michael Wesch used the term in his 2008 lecture, “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube.” A remark meant for friends is read by an employer. A joke that depends on a community's shared history is read by someone with no history. A persona built for one audience is judged by another with different standards.

Offline, people manage this without thinking, by changing register as they move between rooms. Online, the rooms are merged, the utterance is permanent, and the audience for it includes people who have not arrived yet. The strategies people develop in response are familiar once named:

The merged audience also includes the future. A remark is read years later by someone applying the standards of a different time, with none of the context, and the persona that made it may have moved on entirely. Identity online is not a snapshot but a record, and the record does not forget the versions you have discarded.

Status without consent

Standing can be assigned to someone who never asked for it. A single remark, photograph, or moment makes them known, and the service's signals attach to that moment for good.

The count rises. They have no persona ready for the audience it represents, and every response becomes new material for that audience.

The mechanism is the one described under memes and virality. The Star Wars Kid video is a concrete example of unwanted visibility: strangers encountered the clip as its subject's public identity, not a persona the subject chose to build.

The lesson is not that visibility is dangerous, though it can be. It is that the signals measure attention, attention is not approval, and the person under the signals may have chosen none of it.

Common questions

Does a large following mean a person is trusted?

It means many accounts followed at some point. Trust is a relationship, and a count is not one. The two correlate loosely at best, and the count can be bought.

Is using a real name more honest than a pseudonym?

A real name attaches a persona to a legal identity, which has consequences for accountability and for safety. It does not make the persona less selected. A pseudonym with a long history in one community is often more accountable to that community than a real name with none.

Why do people keep accounts on services they dislike?

Because standing does not transfer. The content can be exported; the audience and the reputation cannot. Leaving means starting from zero, and the service is designed so that this is expensive.

Should I try to keep my audiences separate?

That depends on what you say and to whom, and the honest answer is that the merged audience cannot be fully un-merged by anyone. Assume the widest audience is reading, or assume the cost of being read by them, and post accordingly.