# Identity and cultural context

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2003-11-18T12:51:05Z


I had an iChat with my sister Mimi last night. (Luna and Eamon are my niece and and nephew 3 and 5)
iChat with MimiMimi: It's so funny... watching Luna and Eamon. they are sure that they are going to get married. They were both so crushed when we broke it to them that it is not the way it works, though now Luna's latest is that she is going to marry her best friend haley

Joi: hehe

Mimi: kids are so great because they don't buy the societal expectations yet;-) I thought this was great. I've been thinking a lot about identity after danah boyd helped connect my notions of identity on the level of privacy and security and identity on the level of my personal identity as a Japanese/American chanponite. I promise to post my notes from this weekend which will put a sharper point on this from a Japanese identity perspective, but what is amazing as you start to deconstruct the notions of identity is how contextual, cultural and artificial it is. I think that approaching the issue of identity from a technical perspective or a "productivity tool" perspective is the wrong approach and that we have to listen to the sociologist and anthropologists in this space A LOT MORE before we get too far down the road.

Lucky for me I've got a sister in this space too. ;-)





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Social Software, Wireless and Mobile