D9.1: A Specification for FIDIS Journal

Title: RATIONALE FOR THE FIDIS JOURNAL

Rationale for the FIDIS journal

This section seeks to explain the rationale behind the proposed journal, showing why a journal on identity in the Information Society is both relevant and timely.  

Identity is an issue of mounting global importance.  At a practical level, there is increasingly abundant industrial research and development in this field.  The practical, technological developments in the field of identity affect the degree to which an individual controls the management of or access to information about his identity.  This is necessarily a question of liberty and also of privacy: there must be the freedom to engage actively with our environment, but also the opportunity to withdraw and hold back those parts of our selves which we wish to keep within the personal domain.  As a result of these developments, identity is an emerging field in academic research and consolidation of the discussion on what constitutes identity is just beginning.  It is clear that these two spheres of development, the academic and the industrial, are fundamentally related.    

Moves towards an Information Society have, in most cases, intensified rather than created the central problematic of control over access to identity information.  Although there are undeniable benefits, this intensification throws into sharp relief the pitfalls that attend our inexorable progress towards the digitised future.  Governments, commercial organisations, criminals and others are responsible for increasing assaults on the boundaries of a person’s identity.  Information technology has revolutionised the collection, processing and use of identity information since more data can be collected and stored, then processed into usable information.  As more information becomes available, more uses have been found for it, to the extent that collection, storage and processing activities now require heavy, if often ineffective, regulation.  Profiles are built from previously unlinkable identity information; law enforcement has unlimited access to formerly forbidden information, such as passenger databases; surveillance and profiling are consolidated into a process of social sorting such that, once a person is categorised as suspicious, the normal burden of proof is reversed.  The very fabric of society, social relationships and the trust which underpins them, is being reshaped by the ubiquity of technological mediation.

The importance of these issues warrants research into the topic of identity and its emerging forms in the context of information systems.  As discussed further in section 3 below, current research on identity is marked by extreme disciplinary fragmentation, reflected in turn by disciplinary-specific outlets.  Analysis of the existing literature reveals that although there is virtually no cross-disciplinary research in this area, pervasive themes emerge from the literature, which cross disciplinary lines and these may be used as rallying points for researchers, signalling a community of interest.  As questions of identity rise swiftly up the political agenda, it is both an opportunity and a necessity to foster and communicate research in this area.  

A journal on identity in the Information Society would encourage and promote such efforts, seeking to answer the more difficult questions about how different perspectives on this important problem fit together so as to achieve a balanced and holistic understanding of the pressing contemporary issues associated with identity. 

This deliverable is well within the FIDIS partners’ reach.  The FIDIS NoE ensures a multi-dimensional approach by bringing together experts in diverse fields such as robotics, computers, cryptography, applications within government, learning and mobile commerce, policy, regulation and social implications of technology.  By sharing their knowledge, the FIDIS experts will be able to contribute valuable material to the journal as well as induce other related experts contributions.  All workpackage deliverables constitute draft material for the journal and these may then be used as primary material for the articles to be published, thus the journal will also help in the integration of the network process.