Hunter Whitney and Associates, Inc.| hunter@hunterwhitney.com
Imagine that some stranger in a shady corner of the Web comes across your name and a few details of your life and puts together an online presence uncomfortably reminiscent of you. Hard to know what to think at first. It could be anything from coincidence to a con or something else altogether. But this feels more ominous than the theft of a credit card number. We can cancel the plastic, but we can’t cancel our identities. I was involved in such a case recently, and while I cannot discuss the specifics, it introduced me to ideas involving the broader significance of online identity, which is perhaps not discussed widely enough in our professional community.
Your identity consists not of the impersonal strings of numbers assigned to your name by business and government, but of the combination of attributes that fundamentally make you, you. It is a kind of quicksilver that can be hard to grasp but ultimately is crucial to how you relate to others and how they relate to you. It is the sum of our personal histories, personalities, relationships, beliefs, biology, the patterns of our lives and activities, our habits, and more. It is our interface to the world and the internal code that drives us.
Both actively and passively, we create an ever more detailed digital self-portrait. We may be the original content providers, but we are unable to know what mate-
rial will be viewed and how it will be used now and in the future. From blogging to swiping a card at the supermarket, the behavioral patterns of our daily lives are captured in data streams; they create new representations of ourselves. The resulting depictions are dependent on how the data is crunched by algorithms and also by the various kinds of people who interact with it. Sure, that sounds a little abstract and distant. It’s difficult to imagine anyone doing anything problematic with your stuff. But that’s part of the problem; it can be entirely and reasonably unimaginable. Until it isn’t. Our personal identities may be appropriated for simple, direct theft or for more elaborate and nuanced forms of “social engineering” misdeeds such as pretexing. While the idea of using someone else’s name or information for all kinds of underhanded purposes is certainly as old as human society, the impostors have powerful and rapidly evolving new sets of tools.
For many of us, our online presence is becoming an important part of our external identities and has a growing sway over our professional and personal lives. Digital media can capture and present sides and angles of ourselves that we may not have known were there. Our virtual presence can have lasting influences on real-life interactions. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Match.com, not to mention the Google search
results of our names, can sometimes make up the sole representation of our identities to someone interested in learning about us. We are numerical strings, user names, and template profiles. Accurate or not, such data can be someone’s primary means of forming an impression of who we are. We are entering into a kind of open source experiment in identity. Who knows how much the things we choose to present about ourselves online may influence our self-perception. Do we start to believe our own hype? There may be identity feedback dynamics that we have yet to recognize and understand.
It would be hard for many of us to conceive not having the search results at our disposal. The results provide us with instant résumés and context about others. In the past, if we really wanted to learn about someone, we had to rely on talking to people. Now we can get insights and information about others almost instantly without the input of anyone else. For a Web 2.0 spin on Descartes, consider that “SEO ergo sum” may be more appropriate these days than Cogito ergo sum. The catch is that much of this process is mediated by algorithms rather than people. This means that a system that can often be a powerful proxy of our identities can also be easily manipulated. We can SEO (search engine optimization) ourselves, but the question is, what do we stand for? What are our true
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