Digital Personhood: Charting the digital lifespan

We have yet to experience a complete lifespan in the Digital Age, from conception to death in old age. Those who have grown up interacting with digital technology from a very early age are still young, whilst older technology adopters have identities that pre-date the Digital Age, populated with paper trails of memories. Many citizens have only a limited awareness of the permanency and consequence of posting in public and extended social circles. Digital posts from student or teenage years reflecting opinions or behaviour that seemed socially appropriate at that time may not reflect well in future professional life. Digitally mediated interactions produced in life may develop an undesirable perspective if they linger after physical death. The lifelong digital trails generated through our digitally mediated interactions, including online, echo our 'offline' lives, but unlike a physical life, the Digital Lifespan can persist indefinitely, and the rich personal context it provides can be harnessed in ways an individual might not expect or desire.

In this EPSRC-funded research, we will produce unique insights into the digital lifespan of UK citizens both now and in a future where our young Digital Natives approach adulthood, become parents, retire, and pass away. To help generate
these insights, we will first chart the unmapped territory of the "Digital Lifespan" as it is now in the UK, exploring the ways in which virtual and physical aspects of our lives converge, diverge and clash. This chart will be grounded in a series of in-depth studies with UK citizens at four transition points in their lives: approaching adulthood, becoming parents, retiring, and bereavement.

The chart that we create will guide us as we look into a future where citizens increasingly live out their lives through digitally mediated interactions. We will explore the implications of this future with individuals, policymakers, legislators and industry representatives. The knowledge and insight developed into issues surrounding ownership and management of citizens' Digital Lifespans will be used to raise digital literacy. New technologies will be designed and developed, bringing personal digital content together in one place to create a far richer picture than that afforded by currently available tools. Our new technologies will automatically draw out the personal context of such content, making inferential links and distilling the impressions that citizens present of themselves through digital media. These distilled impressions will be reflected back to individuals, raising digital literacy by promoting awareness of how individuals' digital identities are (or will in future be) represented online over their entire lifespan. Further these novel technologies will equip citizens with ways to manage the impression that they give.

Beyond individual citizens, our work will inform educators, policymakers and legislators providing a deeper understanding of what it means to live as a UK citizen in a Digital Age.

Regular interaction with public forums and social networks is now commonplace, yet most individuals have only a limited awareness of the permanency and consequence of posting in public and extended social circles. The lifelong digital trails generated through our digitally mediated interactions, including online, echo our 'offline' lives, but unlike a physical life, the DL can persist indefinitely, and the rich personal context it provides can be harnessed in ways the individual might not expect or desire.

The core impact of the proposed research is to enhance the Digital Literacy of UK society through: a) developing knowledge and insight into issues surrounding ownership and management of the DL, informing educators, policymakers and legislators to ensure individuals benefit from this unprecedented change in human social behaviour; b) developing technology to promote awareness of the DL to individuals, and through reflection on narrative visualizations of their DL, empowering users to manage the way in which they are represented (or will in future be represented) online.

The beneficiaries of the proposed research are no less than all current and future members of UK society. The use of social networks is now ingrained into our everyday lives so that even from before birth personal information is being aggregated in the cloud from social posts about new 'Digital Natives'. As the wealth of personal data constituting the DL grows, in parallel to the physical lifespan, it is crucial that a sense of agency is developed. Digital posts from student or teenage years reflecting opinions or behaviour that may seem socially appropriate at that time, may not reflect well in future professional life. Opinions or online interactions produced in life may present an undesirable perspective if they linger after a user's physical death. By disseminating our technology, and our findings on the role of the DL across key life stages, we will impact society through enhancing the wellbeing of individuals, and through informing educators, policymakers and legislators.

The social data mining technology underpinning this proposal seeks to make sense of large unstructured social data sets, addressing many of the Big Data problems faced by next-generation information infrastructure projects: How to harvest and structure social data? How to draw deep inferences (here, on personal context) from this data to a degree of sophistication beyond simple data harvesting and dumping tools such as Facebook Graph Search and archivers such as Recollect? The ability to draw large-scale inferences on personal context from social media promises future impact to both medicine (e.g. diagnosis of socially linked conditions such as depression) and surveillance for the prevention of crime and terrorism.

Academic beneficiaries of this work encompass technical disciplines such as Computer Vision and Machine Learning where advances in large-scale concept inference have been made but the problem remains unsolved. Human Computer Interaction researchers will benefit from the ethnographic and experience-centred design methods developed, as well as the insights gained through developing a 'research through design' methodology for studying the DL. A full account of the academic beneficiaries of this project is provided elsewhere within this proposal.