Internet States of Presence
So picking up from where we left off in the post on the Internet History let us summarise in condensed form what we may take from there and use in our further reasoning.
The transformations described in that posting eventually lead to the explosion of Web 2.0 were secured through gradual introduction of three distinct states of Internet presence. Whilst online, an individual may act in one of the following three capacities:
- Visitor – freely surfing the net: anonymous, invisible and passive, can only read and download
- Legal Self – predominantly when engaged in some sort of monetary transaction, government or job-related activities: tied up to various offline ID tokens (SSN, Credit Card Number, Legal Address etc.) mostly sporadic, purpose-driven and compulsory, creates two-way tunnels between "real" and "virtual" worlds transferring tangible goods or services
- Internet Service User – authorised with login/password combination, recognisable by nickname and/or avatar active contributor to user generated content and participant in online communication (at the moment fragmented and scattered all over a large number of isolated services)
In purely technical terms of course Legal Self is just a subset of the User state as to be identifiable one has to be logged into a certain service. What makes these two states taxonomically equal is not heir relation to an internet service but their relationship to the outside world. In other words, looking from within a server the former is just a type of the latter but looking from the offline point of view these two are different in kind.
For the part that is to follow it is crucially important to establish that there are only three possible states of presence and no other states exist.
tags: internet history, internet service user, internet states of presence, internet user, legal self, visitor, online, states of internet presence
Posted by LZZR under Social Networks | Comments (2)
