The blind leading the bland

Impolitic as it may be, the digital identity idea I've just mulled through continues to wonder why we're not explicitly considering dig ID implementations that use technology to enhance existing systems and processes rather than replace them artificially. Not the mechanical processes, mind you: the human processes for identifying and authenticating others in the physical world we live in today. Hundreds, if not thousands of years of human evolution and technology development inform the state of the art in this activity. Tools including Gutenburg's invention, the wonders of photography, and computer technology never displaced the human processes. They gave the human process a better alternative.

So, after reading fairly pedestrian article in First Monday (Giving E-mail Back to the Users: Using Digital Sigantures to Solve the Spam Problem), the premise and solution with which I am generally in agreement, I was inspired. The first two sentences of the "Solution" section read as follows: "In real-world face-to-face communcation, we control who we converse with and when. One of the ways we do this is by authenticating the person's identity (face and/or voice recognition, or if we don't recognize the person we "size them up" and look for appearance and behavioral cues indicating whether the person is a threat or not)." These sentences inspired a question that the authors' text does not address and which may provide an interesting approach for working through some part of the digital identity issue. Here's the question:

How do blind people authenticate who they're dealing with in face-to-face interactions?

The analogue ought to be clear. Blind people can not cloister themselves in a cocoon of only pre-existing relationships, and must therefore engage face-to-face interaction (and trust) with strangers. They can not rely on visual clues to "size them up," and most of the literature suggests that the visual sense is primary. I suggest that Internet users are, at least in the moment, metaphorically blind in (first, and possibly ensuing) digital interactions. So, if we understand how blind people deal with the situation, we may be well served in the structure and mechanics of a digital identity process/solution for the masses. It is conceivable, after all, that the technology- and marketing-driven solution sets have limited connection to the human requirements of a solution.

Posted by Grayson at October 28, 2003 08:55 AM