Identity in the Hackable City

Over at The Place of Social Media, Eric Gordon is starting a discussion on what the emergence of social media means for cities, communities, and the individuals who live in them. He makes a great point, that "digitally annotated physical communities often rely on the full disclosure of identity for their functionality. For instance, when it comes to neighborhood issues – it is important to know one’s real name and location."

So as we more fully engage with our civic society through digital means, our identities and opinions may be more extensively tracked; an unintended but logical outcome of digital democracy.

At the same time, American cities, like corporations, are glomming onto digital media because of its populist resonances. They are paying attention to online neighborhoods and seeking to aggregate that data into meaningful information. The ideology of digital media – as evidenced in the phrases “participatory media” and “user-generated content” – is accessibility. Digital media directly aligns the rhetoric of progress with the rhetoric of populism. Social web media makes explicit what has only been implied in the recent rhetoric of city governments – that anyone, regardless of social position, can participate in the ordering of city experience and politics.