3.1: Ego Surfing in the Digital Shadows

This week’s topic covered the idea of your digital shadow, which is the part of your web presence or online identity that you have either lost control of, or had no control over in the first place. A digital shadow is made up of little pieces of information published about you online by someone else, information that you published about yourself a long time ago and no longer want people to see, or information you published about yourself that has gone viral and has been added to by others or has been removed from its originating context appearing on a website you did not intend it for.

Ego searching is a way of checking up on your digital shadow, to see what other people can piece together about you if they look you up online. Ego searching can involve doing a Google search on your name or pseudonyms, or using other services such as blind search (which searches Google, yahoo and Bing) and Spezify which finds information about you on blog posts, social networking etc and gives a more visual representation of you.

I gave it a go and it made me realise just how much power search engines have in the portrayal of our online identities. Their systems of indexing information determine what information people see about you and in what order. My initial searches brought up nothing about me, but the Spezify search was different as it gives a visual response it was easier to pick out the information about myself (be it very small), and the results highlighted to me that twitter makes nothing private.

I discussed this with my fellow students and tutors via the blackboard. Initially my line of conversation was concerned with the digital shadow left by twitter @ mentions. When someone tweets @ you they use your name or pseudonym to send you a message. I use my real name on twitter, and Spezify found it, displaying any tweet that I had been @ mentioned in and displaying attributing it to my digital shadow. This mean that  peoples comments, opinions, and use of language were being marked as part of my online identity. This concerned me, as I am quite conservative on twitter, yet what would other people think of me when they see what others had written to me? Would it affect my reputation? 

My second reaction was to notice that no facebook results came up in the search. Facebook is a place where I cultivate my digital footprint again in my real name and I nurture relationships there so it would be fitting that it would have some kind of digital shadow but the privacy settings on Facebook prevented this information from showing in search results. Once again this was discussed with fellow students and tutors. We discussed why Facebook has such a bad reputation while twitter doesn't. A great point was made by a fellow student relating to the key factor that facebook promotes reconnecting with old friends, therefore to be anonymous on facebook would mean that you would not be found by people. This means that the network is thought to be closed off to those outside your friends list. When facebook information is found to have been made public (to anyone googling you) people are caught out, hence the bad press coverage.

In twitter thought it is fine to be anonymous, connections to others are made via topic and hash tags, not via pre-established social circles. Furthermore as pointed out again by a fellow student tweets are often lost in the mountain of nonsense, lost amongst the many other tweets, the chances of someone finding a bad tweet with your name it are slim. As boyd puts it “This is security through obscurity” (boyd 2008), but the Spezify ego search had just removed my security blanket by picking tweets with my name on it and presenting them in collage format after a search on my name.

Although there is nothing that can really be done to tone down the language or the sentiments others express to you via tweet and @ mentions, this discussion really did push forward that idea that it important to really know and understand the privacy settings on any social network / web platform that you choose to use, as this information can be searched, just like any other information found on the web. Knowing how to utilise the privacy settings on the platforms you use, in order to prevent search engine indexing is one way of preventing those skeletons from leaping out of the closet, or in my case -  being associated with the skeletons of others.

boyd, d. (2008). Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck
Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14(1), 13–20. Retrieved from www.danah.org/papers/FacebookPrivacyTrainwreck.pdf. doi:10.1177/1354856507084416

*Names of students and direct quotes were deliberately left out of this post in order to protect the privacy of fellow students… copies of the conversations can be found in the appendix of assignment 4