Conformity

Full Title or Meme

The struggle between human individual identity and Conformity to the Common Good will always ebb and flow as technologies change the ways that humans interact.

Context

• Humans are social animals, human society grows as the Common Goods of the society accumulate, but individualism has been the goal the past 200 years, or at least since the publication of On Liberty
• The Web has grown up with a strong dose of Anarchy. See the wiki page Declaration of Independence.
• Although this wiki is mostly about identity on the Web, the use of identity politics is based on what that a human thinks of themselves in the real-world, which influences the way that identity is representing in the digital world. In an interest self-help column Vanessa Friedman says that

  Truth is, we all indicate allegiance to various social groups in how we dress, it's how we telegraph who we are to kindred spirits (or those who are the opposite). ... Which means your question is not really about your clothes at all. It's about your social and cultural life. Do you want to fit in or stand apart? Play the the game or change the game? And how much of your own sense of self are you willing to sacrifice to do it? ... The good news is that the pendulum is increasingly swinging in favor of the individual, rather than the group.