Who Are You Online?

I am an extremely accessible person when it comes to my online identity. You can Google me, Facebook me or find me via a number of other services but no matter where you look, there is a good chance that I'm there online. This isn't the case for everybody though and frequently it is difficult to determine in an instant who somebody is. For domains, it's extremely simple to figure out where a computer is but for people it is not. We revert to Google and Facebook and if we don't find anybody there we are frequently at a loss. Another problem is the constant shift of online identities. I have a profile on Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Flickr, Twitter, Plurk, Bebo, hi5, LinkedIn and I also have at least 4 blogs that I've published and you can use each of them to find information about me from some point in time. The most frequently updated profile of myself is still Facebook but even that can occasionally get out of date. So how can somebody know that the information they are looking at is the most recently updated version of me online? Unfortunately they can't. Luckily I do a pretty good job but to me this is a substantial problem. Wasn't the point of all these communication tools to make it easier to find each other and converse? While I don't intend for this to be a philosophical rambling, I do think that there is an online identity crisis that needs to be solved. Otherwise we are building this massive digital wasteland of previous identities that were never rolled up into one single existence. I like being me but I'd also like control of who I am and when I move websites or change jobs, I don't want remnants of my old identity to be what first shows up. We have become conscious of our former selves and have been taught to make sure nothing "unprofessional" shows up on it but why can't I control it? Honestly, rather then simply accepting our virtual past as part of our identities why aren't there better systems to control it? I realize that this brings open standards and cross-platform communication into the discussion but I don't my the complexities of the discussion. All I simply want to know is why do I still not have complete control of my digital identity? I should be able to easily control it. I shouldn't have to know about robots.txt files to block out the Wayback Machine and I shouldn't have to go through the process of configuring my .htaccess file to redirect my former website to the new one. These things should be easier to control. Is there a solution or is this just too big of a problem to resolve?

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Who Are You Online?

Nick O'Neill

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Nick O'Neill