I haz a nom

…for the Personal Blog category in the Blog Awards. (Firstly, wow neato!).. Which got me to thinking, how personal is my blog, really? I guess you can learn a bit about me in general, what I work at, my personal interests and those things that I come across on the internet and like enough to post about. What does that really tell you? Would I post about my relationship? No, not even if he didn’t mind, but I can’t imagine that he would like if I put my musings about our most recent silly fight over who gets to play Guitar Hero first and what my stalking out of the room means for the future, our future. Would I post about myself if I was sick? Maybe, what if I was really sick, probably not. Just a bit of a disclaimer there, I’m fine, occasional sniffles. However last year, I was in hospital with something possibly quite serious, but I was afraid to write about, even over in my private livejournal account.

The folks over on twitter say that yeah, employers will google you, and what you’ve written, or those drunked facebook photos will potentially affect getting the job. That’s fine by me, I think being googlable is a pretty employable trait, well, as long as you have the quality and charachter to back it up. But do I really, maybe I should cut out the talk about interesting internets, cat macros and 101 things and stick to writing about work. Well, simply put, I don’t want to. This blog helps me to balanace all those things by making me focus a little on the things going on outside of the office. I’ve been especially motivated to get stuck into achieving some of my 101 list. Still, it seems to end there, sometimes there are things that I would like to talk about. Ask for some advice from the people out there on the internet, but I’m held back. I wonder if there will be a time when you can share those secrets, and employers will say, hey look, there’s a normal person behind this CV when they do their googling. They’re not just awesome at xyzing the shizzle, there’s someone I could talk to as well. Mmmhm. I don’t know.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “I haz a nom”

Shanemcl January 20th, 2009 at 4:55 pm

Saw your status update and thought I’d take a gander at the blog! Hmmm, the article you’ve just written seems largely an article about privacy, identity and the internet. There are a few issues here I can think of, which seem relevent:

First off, there is the problem of ‘identity theft’. This can occur whereby you leave enough breadcrumbs on the internet for someone to cross-correlate that information and build up a profile on you.

Second off, as you know, identity in the 21st century has increasingly become ‘individuated’, whereby individuals construct the ’self’ through-out their lives. What’s important about posting information on the internet, is that it can leave a relic of your previous ’selves’. Thus, your past can constrain your identity ‘construction’. Particularly when it can’t be left behind. For example, archive.org has been archiving web pages on the internet for nearly 10 years now. This can be seen as both positive and negative. On a positive, it means you have to face all of your past realies. On a negative, it can give people (such as employers) a false sense of who you are ‘now’; it can constrain you.

Third Point, there is an issue with social networking sites, that individuals have too much ‘control’ around their online identity. Individuals can now put themselves in a position to be able to package their life online, and this online construction may not be ‘holistically’ representative of the integrated identity. It may represent a planned and controlled fragment of your identity, or even an entirely manufactured identity. At the other extreme, the fragments of identity that does lie on the internet, may result in people constructing a narrow and perhaps even false sense of who you are as an integrated identity.

Final point, the solution to all this seems 3 fold. (1)Government policy with regards data protection (2)Responsibility and forsight with regard to website owners and content managers (3)Individual responsiblity, in terms of managing your online identity and maintaining a degree of foresight.

Overall, it seems like there isn’t a polarising solution. A balanced attitude to your identity and privacy on the internet seems the best approach. Individuals need to be vigilant and maintain foresight when posting information on the web. On the other-hand, individuals need to be attentive to how, ‘controlled’ and ‘representative’ that information on the web is of their ‘integrated identity’

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