Flocking Around with Online Identity.

Encouraged by the utopian promise of simple social media management, last week I downloaded the Flock Browser. I’ve been using it for all of six days now, and I have to say it’s very handy, if a bit existentially unsettling. We’ll get to the unsettling bit momentarily. As to its overall handiness, Flock is a browser-based social media aggregator built on Mozilla’s Firefox 3 platform. This being the case, its general browser features are already familiar to any regular Firefox user. What’s different is a social media account management sidebar, a media preview header panel, and a navigation tab that grants quick access to all of your various social media accounts. I simply logged into my various accounts from the browser one time—Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Gmail, and Yahoo email in my case—and suddenly there they all were in a handy menu. No more searching for bookmarks. No more logging in. It took me about 30 minutes over lunch to set it up. Particularly interesting to me is the ability to detect and collect all of the media from a Web page and display it in an easy to peruse thumbnail menu. There is also a handy drag and drop feature that allows you to share content between your various social media accounts quickly and easily.

Of course the downside of a browser-based aggregator became immediately apparent to me when I got home that first night and realized that I would have to repeat the entire browser download and configure exercise if I wanted to enjoy the same conveniences on my home computer. Abstaining is not really an option as spending a single afternoon with such handy social media access makes going back to the ‘old way’ insufferable. I suppose that’s a testimony to the usefulness of a tool like Flock.

Now on to the existentially unsettling bit. Flock isn’t merely an aggregator of social media. It’s an aggregator of bits and pieces of the user’s online identity. For this reason, playing with Flock is, well, a bit of a mind flock.

Back in the old Web 1.0 world an online identity consisted of a perfectly sublime Cartesian ego, wholly lacking in identifiable empirical qualities. We all appeared as ageless, genderless, ethnographic blanks who resided nowhere and everywhere, and were neither rich nor poor, nor beautiful nor ugly, nor tall nor short, etc. While not exactly very personable, such a sparse identity afforded quite a bit of anonymity. The Web 2.0 world is quite different. With the rise of social media our online selves have really begun to take on some flesh and bone. We now have identifiable visages, both animate and inanimate, and voices, and friends, and families, and pets, and coworkers, and jobs, and hobbies, and home towns, and old friends from high school and college. The internet is inundated with documentary evidence that ties your digital existence to your analog existence. It just tends not to be centralized in one place. The various online communities in which people participate may overlap at certain points, but they are largely discrete. And in many instances people go to lengths to keep them discrete— in an effort to keep their private and professional lives separate, for example. These self-imposed firewalling efforts are important to people. Just recently, for instance, I tested the ‘share’ functionality of White Horse’s Web site by posting to my own Facebook wall. A White Horse colleague responded to my post with the comment, “Hey! You got work in my Facebook!”

The Flock browser recognizes none of your intentional or unintentional social segmentation efforts. It brings all of the bits and pieces of your online identity together into one place so you can view it in a way you never imagined or intended. That’s its job and it does it quite well. And this is what makes using Flock a little creepy. By providing a quick-switching surveillance camera view into all of the various corridors and lacunae of your online existence, the Flock browser turns you into the night watchman of your own digital soul. Factor in the drag and drop tools that make it super-easy to cross-pollinate all of your social media content, and it’s also potentially dangerous. I can see how it would be really easy for a Flock-using millionaire Bruce Wayne to accidently get some Batman onto his Facebook profile. And when that happens the jig is up. This is a powerful tool. If you’re a superhero with a secret identity I suggest you use it with extreme caution.