Public sector engagement with online identity management

The individual management of online identity, as part of a wider politics of personal information, privacy, and dataveillance, is an area where public policy isdeveloping and where the public sector attempts to intervene. This paper attempts tounderstand the strategies and methods through which the UK government and publicsector is engaging in online identity management. The analysis is framed by the analyticsof government (Dean 2010) and governmentality (Miller and Rose 2008). This approachdraws attention to the wide assemblage of public and private actors with shared regimesof practice and fields of visibility, as well as to the extent to which individual actors aremade responsible for their own identity management. The paper also uses communicationand discursive research to examine the potential failings of engagement efforts. Communication theory suggested that the assumption of individual responsibility, alongside linguistic distortions created by this way of understanding the problematic ofidentity management, complicate and fundamentally limit engagement activity