Since yesterday was a holiday in Austria, I rather frivolously decided to take the day off from translating and devote my attention to some things I had been wanting to do for two projects that I am involved. I especially wanted to explore the space where they intersect from opposite directions: "social networking". So I posted some questions and information to the relevant lists and announced that I would be available all day via email, irc or Skype and set off from there to start exploring the kinds of online spaces where people are supposed to be able to connect with one another. For one of the projects, "Street Training – city of respect", where my role is to facilitate communication, I have been using delicious to gather relevant links from the start, rather than attempting to collect all the information in one place. We also have two mailing lists, one for the organizers and one for the workshop participants, but that doesn't seem to be the preferred mode of communication for anyone involved, except me. The other project is the Eclectic Tech Carnival, which will be taking place in Linz this year in July. One of the themes that we especially want to focus on is the question of online services and applications that women pick up very quickly to stay in touch with family and friends far away. What we need to be aware of, what it says in the "fine print", is particularly important this year in Linz, because one of the co-organizing groups is MAIZ, an autonomous organization of and for migrant women in Upper Austria. Many of these women are anything but technophobe, when it comes to using communication technologies, but it seems that important background information is often missing. My experience today, however, was quite different from what I had anticipated, when I set out to make accounts for myself on all the popular sites, to set up groups and connections and pay attention to the processes and the fine print along the way. Although I managed to cope with Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, and Yahoo, in addition to Skype, AIM, ICQ and IRC, myspace ultimately defeated me. In the end, I felt that deleting the account was the only form of protesting against the constraints that was left to me, but by that time I had the feeling I was already developing a serious identity crisis. Who am I? Start with my name: my real name, my whole name, variations, obfuscations, an invented name for anonymity? How public are these spaces and what are the potential disadvantages of using my whole, real name? I got past the first question by thinking, who cares who I am? I have no enemies that I am aware of, no ex-husband stalking me, no former co-workers out for revenge, I'm hardly a teenager threatened by potential predators, and I am seriously not worried about what my mother might find out about me online (nor my children either, for that matter). Why bother being anonymous? The question of name is usually followed by a question about gender, disappointingly invariably phrased as an either/or choice of male or female. Why? I don't generally have a problem identifying myself as female, but what is the point? That says nothing whatsoever about me as a person. In one of the registration forms I was struggling to fill in, I was quite baffled when the question of male or female was followed by a choice: “I am interested in men” or “I am interested in women”. How is that an either/or question? What does it mean to be “interested” in someone – someone, let alone an arbitrarily defined group of someones that could potentially include roughly half of humanity? I’m guessing that this is supposed to be a well intentioned discreet question about sexual orientation, but even so, seeking to constrain the spectrum of sexual orientation and the whole range of potential erotic interests that are possible to a simple either/or question is simultaneously so open and so closed that it becomes completely meaningless either way. Yet in attempting to grasp only the first three questions, I lost sight of what I was actually trying to do, and without being aware of it, I had already accepted the foundation for constructing identity that is implied in this order: person – gender – sexual orientation. I find this seriously disturbing. The next building block on top of this highly dubious foundation generally seems to revolve around putting the named, gendered, sexually oriented identity into a context of predefined relationships. While it seems that the old categories of married or not married have been broken down or opened up to some extent, it still appears to be important to define a specific relationship status, even though – in once case, at least – the choices offered ranged all the way to “It’s too complicated and I don’t want to talk about it”. That one actually appealed to me, but it seemed a little too dramatic for me. I thought something like “Sometimes I get a bit confused” would be a nice choice, but I couldn’t find that as an option anywhere. In the end, I found myself defined – seemingly voluntarily – over and over as a female over 40, married with children. By itself, this information is wholly devoid of any content, although it might well serve as a surface for myriad projections. Some anonymous stranger might read that as a description: traditional, conventional, conservative, maybe interested in cooking and gardening and parenting issues ... Or it might suggest a bored housewife potentially up for all kinds of illicit naughtiness, following a well established narrative from spam. As entirely inane and irrelevant as this is, however, what concerns me is how my goal of exploring possibilities of exchange and connections within the framework of “terms of use” and “privacy policies” defined by the respective corporate owners was initially deflected from the start through the rigid constraints of constructing an identity through the process of “registration”. Naturally I understand that the concept of “social networking” is based on matching certain terms of information, which can only work if there is a certain consistency among the terms used. It seems to me, however, that the presuppositions underlying the terms defined and also valorized through the organization of “user input” need to be seriously questioned. And now I am wondering, what happens to all the people whose terms don’t match the given choices?