#mynameis: A Timeline

It’s been a few days since the climax of Facebook’s “real name” saga, and the furore seems to have mostly died down. Facebook has officially apologised to the hundreds of drag queens, members of the LGBTQIA community, DJs, stage performers and others who use pseudonyms on Facebook for the policy which forced them to switch to their “real”, legal names on Facebook or face being locked out of their accounts and networks. It has made also made noises to the effect of revising, reinterpreting or otherwise adapting the policy to account for the ways in which a good portion of Facebook’s demographic use its service.

A lot took place in a short space of time, by way of protests, petitions, heartfelt personal accounts, hashtags, a suddenly viral new social network and more. So how exactly was it that we got from then to now? And where does the future of identity on Facebook really stand? In this post, I’ll attempt to break down what happened with a timeline of key events, and get to the bottom of where the policy is going.

Crowdsourcing a Crisis

Last entry I talked about the evolution of “crowdthings” – such as crowdsourcing and crowdwisdom – which bring together the vast amounts of people connected by the Internet to achieve a complex task, or even just to carry out a simple task in an unforeseen way. Now we’re seeing the power of crowdsourcing in a crisis as the online public helps out in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

How are they able to do that? The answer lies in a website called Tomnod, which allows its users to scour footage captured by satellite imaging company DigitalGlobe in a bid to locate anything that might be of interest to the search parties. Users helping with the search for flight MH370, which vanished without a trace four days ago, have the option of tagging what they think could be wreckage, life rafts, an oil slick or “anything interesting or suspicious” in 3,200 km² of satellite imagery, in which each pixel represents 50cm of space. The site gives visual examples of the items in question, in order to clue users in about what to look for.

#ao3million and #fandompocalypse: The Fandom Stars Have Aligned

February 15, 2014: truly a day for the fandom history books. Why? Because by pure serendipity, two milestone events for the fandom community have collided on the exact same day. One is “Fandompocalypse Day”, an movement to unite fans of disparate fandoms in a joint show of pride and unity; the other is the user-oriented, not-for-profit multimedia fanworks site Archive Of Our Own reaching one million published works.

Both events celebrate the diverse and unifying nature of fandom in different ways: Fandompocalypse aims to bring the fandom movement offline with a visual display of fandom support in day-to-day life, while the “ao3million” celebrations are purely online, based around graphics, Twitter hashtags and uploading new fanworks to the site. Nevertheless, the spirit of enjoyment and sharing the fandom love is exactly the same.