Digital Delights

Reputation can be bought it seems. But is one's reputation dependent upon online presence only? How many more people would have been fooled by the Santiago Swallow personality if Ashton had not himself exposed the ruse? How long could the experiment have continued if Ashton had stayed silent? How many of us still take content and personalities at face value when we encounter them online? These and many other questions about online identity, reputation, provenance and trust are still to be answered. My own rudimentaty manipulation of identity with my @timbuckteeth account and more recently the activation of my @stevewheeler sleeper account have given me some clues about the above questions. I have written about this in two posts, Double Agent and Double or Quits, where I explain some of my own thinking about online presence and digital identity. I would be very interested to hear from others about their views on these and other online identity experiments. What are the implications for us personally, socially and culturally?