Digitizing Identities : Doing Identity in a Networked World

This book explores contemporary transformations of identities in a digitizing society across a range of domains of modern life. As digital technology and ICTs have come to pervade virtually all aspects of modern societies, the routine registration of personal data has increased exponentially, thus allowing a proliferation of new ways of establishing who we are. Rather than representing straightforward progress, however, these new practices generate important moral and socio-political concerns. While access to and control over personal data is at the heart of many contemporary strategic innovations domains as diverse as migration management, law enforcement, crime and health prevention, "e-governance," internal and external security, to new business models and marketing tools, we also see new forms of exclusion, exploitation, and disadvantage emerging.

Irma van der Ploeg is Senior Research Fellow at UNU-MERIT at Maastricht University Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology.

Jason Pridmore is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University in the Netherlands.