Your Very Own Online Identity Calculator!
Friday, August 21, 2009 by Mirandarin
The rapid expansion of the digital realm has left us constantly bombarded with information. This forces us to be selective, to filter such information in terms of our interests and desires. The means to be selective have been provided, such as search engines that narrow down lists of thousands of potential sources. We have become accustomed to this type of society, and we have become more and more demanding. It is no surprise that many of us have adopted a 'get-to-the-point' attitude, particularly apparent in online culture. We want information, and we want it fast. And just as a search engine can save us many laborious hours of research, 'befriending' a person on a social networking site such as Facebook allows people to achieve the status of 'friend' (debatable, I know) while omitting more than a few time-consuming steps in the traditional path to friendship (developing trust and affection to name a couple).
On a different note, I was surfing the net for websites concerning online identity when I stumbled across this site that claims to calculate your personal online identit
y by placing you in one of four categories on the “Digital Scale”. The site allows you to monitor your online "brand" (the impression of you that people receive when they enter your name into a search engine), providing potential steps for tweaking your online identity to your satisfaction. This aligns well with the notion of the ‘idealised self’ - the identity that a person chooses to be projected. This particular website is concerned with online identities in the career domain, so this online "brand" is obviously one that is going to portray a person in a good light to potential employers. In my opinion, it is highly unlikely that this site, or any other for that matter, can allow people to exert full control over their online identities. However, I think this serves as a good example of how identities are performed in ways that take other people's potential perceptions of a person into consideration prior to said identity performance. In other words, what others think, matters.
On a different note, I was surfing the net for websites concerning online identity when I stumbled across this site that claims to calculate your personal online identit
y by placing you in one of four categories on the “Digital Scale”. The site allows you to monitor your online "brand" (the impression of you that people receive when they enter your name into a search engine), providing potential steps for tweaking your online identity to your satisfaction. This aligns well with the notion of the ‘idealised self’ - the identity that a person chooses to be projected. This particular website is concerned with online identities in the career domain, so this online "brand" is obviously one that is going to portray a person in a good light to potential employers. In my opinion, it is highly unlikely that this site, or any other for that matter, can allow people to exert full control over their online identities. However, I think this serves as a good example of how identities are performed in ways that take other people's potential perceptions of a person into consideration prior to said identity performance. In other words, what others think, matters.
Excellent - this is a great example!