When we were young, we had a shoebox, filled with badges - cheap trophies and souvenirs of places visited and events participated in, or illustrating a particular epoch or mood.

From memory, there was:

• at least one Blue Peter badge
• a big one with a picture of a screw on it (the significance of which completely eluded me until I was much older)
• a yellow Guardian one with the slogan “have breakfast with a friend”
• one with the Laxey Wheel on it
• one from the Puffin Club
• a gorilla one from LondonZoo
• a brown one from Beamish, with a silhouette of a coal cart on it
• one from the GLC (I think) which said “I’m a Capital Kid”
• one with tiny print in the middle saying “if you can read this, you’re too close”
• several indicating that bombs and nuclear things in general were bad ideas

and so on.

Every now and again, we’d get the box down from the top of the wardrobe and sift through it, ritualistically rummaging for favourites, the familiar sound of rustling tin, scent of metal and prick of unleashed pins always a slightly painful thing, but adding up to a sense memory which lingers.

Over the years, we gradually gathered more badges, which didn’t make it into the box, but instead were stuck on bags, coats, pinboards, where they communicated our passions, affiliations and personalities to the world around us. We didn’t weat badges and buttons because they were aesthetically pleasing, but because they said something about the person wearing them, acting as a social shorthand.

In my teenage years, I had and regularly wore badges:

• from events I’d attended - concerts, rallies and the like
• given out by a west London indie club no-one else seems to remember called The Cube, where I first drank Newcastle Brown Ale and danced to The Pixies
• illustrating socio-political points - ban the bomb, free Nelson Mandela, anti-vivisection, pro-human rights
• for bands that I particularly liked, usually printed badly in two colours, slightly off-centre and bought from a bloke with a giant sack of them under the westway on Portobello Rd

Badges were a way of exposing identity, and as such the symbols became much more compelling and familiar than clothing brand logos. In most pictures of me as a teenager, there’s at least one badge visible. Both the badge itself and the fact I was wearing one at all speak volumes about the kind of person I was.

I was wearing my heart on my sleeve. You only had to look.

Last year, before I left AOL, I devised and worked on a project that played on the idea of displaying your likes and dislikes in a social environment, as a way of demonstrating to the rest of the organisation that it was possible to use agile methods to create something socially compelling within a short time, but which didn’t need to be complicated. In fact, sometimes the silliest, most straightforward ideas can work just as well if not better than the overcomplicated ones. It was an experiment, really, but one with a public face.

The site was (is!) Badj.it, and its main proposition was “social sharing of binary opinions”. In real language, that means it was based on the idea that most people have a simple opinion about most things.

So a person could create an opinion about a particular thing - either they love it or hate it - and then their opinion would be recorded against that thing, along with their name, and alongside everyone else who shared that particular opinion - people who love this thing or people who hate it. Then, using a sort of relational approach, all the opinons a person had recorded would then be displayed on their profile page in the same way - things I love and things I hate.

On the thing’s page, the result was like a club, a list of people who shared strong opinions - passions, whichever side of the fence they’re on - about something, and that’s what they had in common. On the personal page, it worked like the badges I used to pepper my schoolbag with, being a list of things I was for or against, displayed against my name for everyone to see. Demonstrating a public allegiance or affinity to (or aversion to) something. Wearing my heart on my sleeve, again.

As a result, when I look at the collections of Facebook groups which people collect on their profiles, I can’t help but think about badges, again. The same is true of Lunarstorm’s “clubs”.

People don’t join Facebook groups to talk, necessarily: they join them to belong, and because being a member means being able to display the title - the badge - on your page.

What can you tell about me from the fact that I belong to these facebook groups?

Transliteracy â–ª Virtual Worlds Forum Europe â–ª Ideas to change the world… â–ª Theory.org.uk and friends â–ª Open RSA London â–ª Frints â–ª Online News Association UK â–ª Got a job via the Guardian â–ª I judge you when you use poor grammar. â–ª 13th Floor Club â–ª Shadowglobe â–ª If You Can’t Differentiate Between “Your” and “You’re” You Deserve To Die â–ª People who walk up or down escalators and then stop at the top or bottom must be made to suffer some consequences. â–ª Barnes Massive â–ª Guardianista â–ª Nikon Digital Photography â–ª United World College â–ª Lester B. Pearson UWC â–ª AOL UK Alum and current workers

I don’t think I’ve visited many of these groups since joining, let alone posted in them, but they sit on my profile as a form of badge, identifying my affiliation, approval, allegiance with their sentiments, organisations or topic.

I went to those colleges. I worked in those places. I belong to those organisations and I believe that people who can’t use grammar correctly are subhuman.

It’s social shorthand: while the rest of my profile is “I am what I say I am”, the groups are more like “I am what I belong to” or “I am what I wear pinned to my chest”.

What are your badges?