Over recent years, social network communities (e.g. inter alia, friendster, contact lists, weblog communities, newsgroups) have been steadily building up in the online world. There is now sufficient critical mass of such infrastructure to postulate things about identity and the Self, as reflected in the social fabric of the online world.
How might we sense identity from the online social fabric? Semiotician Jacques Lacan has argued that words and concepts carry meaning primarily by what they signify. Roland Barthes proposed that the particular mappings between signifier and signified originate in cultural systems of semiology. Such cultural systems of signs have grown in importance as mass consumption has replaced subjective culture as the dominant contemporary cultural paradigm. Because the signifying value of possessions associated with the Self serves an important social function in signalling identity, it is possible to view identity and the Self as a collection of consumption decisions (cf. Social Constructionist Theory of Identity).
InterestMap mines online social network communities to create a rich influence network of interests and subcultures. Some of the interests represented in the network are, inter alia, television and films, foods, geographies, music, sports, hobbies, activities, objects, and people. The strength of connections between interests are learned from the digestion of on the order of one hundred thousand user profiles from online social networks. For example, a person who likes X may also mention Y as an interest on her homepage. Identity and tastes emerge as patterns of intersection on InterestMap.
by Hugo Lui and Pattie Maes
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