Social web and identity: a likely encounter
Thierry Nabeth
Received: 14 September 2009 /Accepted: 14 September 2009 /Published online: 1 October 2009
# The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract The Web 2.0, with online social technologies such as social networking
services, blogs, wikis, or microbloging, has brought the vision of the Internet as a
social landscape in which people are engaged in a multitude of social activities. This
editorial of the special issue ‘Social Web and Identity’ discusses the importance of
identity in the context of the Social Web, introducing the different papers of this
special issue and the different aspects associated to these online identities. The topics
covered in this issue include how people define their identity in blogs and what is the
articulation between online and offline identities in these systems. It also presents an
article studying the privacy issues in online social networks and more specifically
how these risks are perceived and how people can control their identity in this
context. The next article compares privacy in two different categories of social
systems (social network and collaborative workspace). Finally, another article
discusses to what extent the current legislation, such the data protection regulations
directive 95/46/EC, is providing the right instrument for dealing with privacy issues.
Keywords Identity . Social web . Blogs . Social networking services
Introduction: The rise of the social web, and of online identity
The Social Web, and more generally the Web 2.0 phenomenon, has totally
transformed our vision of the Web from one that was just dealing mainly with a
huge amount of information, into a system for which one of the most important roles
IDIS (2009) 2:1–5
DOI 10.1007/s12394-009-0029-z
T. Nabeth (*)
INSEAD, Bvd de Constance, 77305 Fontainebleau Cedex, France
e-mail: thierry.nabeth@insead.edu

is to support the social process (Chi 2008). In the Social Web, individuals use a
variety of tools such as blogs, wikis, social networking services, social bookmarking,
microbloging, etc. to communicate with one another, to share opinion, to manage
their social network, and more generally to conduct activities that are centred on
people and not any longer on documents.
Of course, the new social software did not invent the use of the Internet to support
this kind of communication. Many tools were used well before the Web 2.0 era for
supporting social interaction such as email (which was actually one of the first
Internet application), chat (with even special tools such as IRC), forums, electronic
bulletin board and virtual communities (The WELL (Rheingold 1993), one the
oldest and most famous virtual community was created in 1985), MUD (text-based
multi-users games), and virtual worlds, to name a few. However, what makes the
new tools and services different, and probably explains the reason for their success,
is that they intervene at the whole social level, and not only the mere communication
level. The Social Web provides the means to identify other people (who are only
know indirectly or are perfect strangers), to assess the benefit of engaging with them
into a social exchange and to continue the interaction. Indeed social exchange theory
(Thibaut and Kelly 1959) states that people interact with others if they have good
reasons for it. Social tools also have a role of informing of the activities of others,
and reinforcing the sense of belonging, and therefore participation (Wandersman and
Giamartino 1980). They also contribute to the establishment of trust between parties,
another important factor in people participation (Tung et al. 2001).
In this perspective, a central component of the Social Web is the support for the
definition and the construction of rich online identities. These identities consists of a
patchwork of information of diverse origins and quality and which includes both
information self declared by users in their online profiles (pseudonyms, ages,
interest, etc.), information that can be inferred from their actions (people can express
their opinion, and leave traces that are easily available), but also information
explicitly declared by others (e.g. opinions stated about the person) or more
explicitly observed (such as reputation and online social status).
Hence, the Social Web offers a number of mechanisms that contribute to the
definition, construction and the functioning of these online identities that
subsequently have a strong influence on the social process. These mechanisms
include sophisticated user profiles typically found in online social networking
services that are used to describe people identity at the individual level (with online
CVs) or at the social level (who they know, and group affiliations). They also
include different means of declaring their more informal identity, such as when they
express their views in a personal blog. They also include socially translucent
mechanisms making the social activity more visible (Erickson et al. 2002) and
allowing the observation of people’s actions, and know about their behaviour.
Identity in the Social Web: questions and issues
Online identity in the social web raises a number of questions and issues.
The first question is related to the form and the nature of these online identities.
Identities in the social web can be found in a variety of forms in the different social
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tools: declared explicitly in the profiles of the online social sites; presented more
implicitly via the postings of opinion in personal blogs that allow people to express
their beliefs, in the reputation mechanisms systems that can be found in commerce
site and that provide reputation indicators (Resnick et al. 2000), or in the social roles
that emerge in systems such as Wikipedia. As will be indicated in a paper in this
special issue, an element that can participate to online identity can start very early
with the choice of a pseudonym. Online identity and offline identity may not also be
totally disconnected from one another, but become two facets of a single ‘blended’
identity.
Second, these identities ‘deal’ with personal data, and represent a number of risks
(Rosenblum 2007) that are related to the exposure of this data. For instance
employers or prospective employers have been collecting information in personal
blogs or social networking site about employees (a recent study has found that 45%
of companies have adopted this practice (Eaton 2009)), and have used them to
dismiss them (or deny them jobs) (Viégas 2005; Mannan and van Oorschot 2008).
Yet at the same time, people have developed strategies to protect or manage their
online identities by using pseudonyms or by constructing embellished identities. In
the later case it has been demonstrated that the information present in profiles of
online dating sites is not totally accurate, and for instance, people are known to lie as
a way of generating a better impression (Toma et al. 2008). Of course this
‘unreliability’ of online identities can also apply in both direction and end users also
have to learn not to trust them blindly. Besides, a number of legal instruments, such
as law related to the protection of personal data, also exist that can applied in an
online context in the case other methods have failed to resolve a situation.
Understanding online identity in the Social Web
This special issue about the Social Web and Identity tries to shed some light on the
subject.
Blogging, which has represented one of the first social tools invented as part of
Web 2.0, constitutes the context of the first two articles “Mick or Keith: Blended
Identity of Online Rock Fans”, by Andrea Baker (Baker 2009), and “Constructing
academic alter-egos: Identity Issues in a Blog-based Community” by Vanessa Paz
Dennen (Dennen 2009). The first paper discusses the “blended identity" of online
rock fans to show that the standard dichotomy between anonymous and real life
personas is an inadequate description of self-presentation in online communities.
The second paper, which relies on a longitudinal ethnographic study, uses the
context of an academic blogging community to explore how the elements constitute
and contribute to a blogger’s identity, the role of the pseudonyms, and how these
identities are shaped and affected by participation in the larger blogging community
to which they belong.
The third paper “Social networks and web 2.0: are users also bound by data
protection regulations?” by Brendan Van Alsenoy, Joris Ballet, Aleksandra
Kuczerawy (Van Alsenoy et al. 2009) examines the extent to which the existing
legislation is already adequate to deal with privacy issues in the social web. More
specifically it investigates the liability of users of social network sites under data
Social web and identity: a likely encounter (Editorial of the special issue) 3

protection and assesses the extent to which the current legal framework can
sufficiently accommodate the new realities of web 2.0 and social networking
applications.
The fourth paper, “Privacy Concerns and Identity in Online Social Networks”, by
Hanna Krasnova, Oliver Günther and Sarah Spiekermann (Krasnova et al. 2009) is
about perception of risk and control of online identity in the context of the social
web. Using focus groups and an empirical study, it first tries to understand privacy-
related concerns. It then examines the impact of these privacy concerns on the
self-disclosure of information.
The last paper, “A Comparison of Privacy Issues in Collaborative Workspaces
and Social Networks”, by Martin Pekárek and Stephanie Pötzsch (Pekárek and
Pötzsch 2009), makes a comparison, with regard to privacy threats of two of types of
Web 2.0 applications—collaborative workspaces (Wikipedia) and social network
sites (FaceBook). It finds that both of these systems suffer from the same privacy
issues, and that one of the principal risk is related to the use of personal data in
contexts other than the original and intended one. Its analysis suggests that a
combination of technical, legal, and normative solutions should be considered to
counter privacy issues.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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