For 23 Things, I decided to create a whole new identity for myself, which presented me with yet another issue. Did I want my new identity to be purely professional, or was it going to be personal as well? Put simply, was my blog just going to be about libraries, or was it going to include all my other interests as well, and if the latter, would library colleagues mind the occasional picture of crochet, or would craft friends be interested in all my library things? In the end, I decided that the answer was 'yes', and going forwards, I'm going to use my 23 Things blog for anything that I wouldn't post to my pseudonymous blog. Three online identities is too much for even me to handle. I've been reading about people's struggles to remember passwords with a sort of hollow laughter - I have 2 Twitter accounts, 2 registered Google IDs, 2 Google Wave accounts, 3 blogs, Facebook, a Yahoo mail account, my work email and my work login
When you're pseudonymous, protecting your privacy is important and easier. I've been intrigued by the posts during 23 Things about privacy in 'the real world'.
(quick disclaimer: After this post, this blog will be moving to Wordpress. This has something to do with privacy, since my non-professional identity is connected to a gmail account, which is what you need for this Blog. That, the logging in and out logistics, and my general dislike of Blogger, are sending me elsewhere)
I'm sure one of the main things many of you had to do when setting up your blog and your various accounts for Things was decide what you were happy sharing and what you weren't. There were certainly plenty of posts on the matter, particularly surrounding Facebook and LinkedIn, although I also saw people express worries about photos on Flickr. The internet encourages and enables you to be as open as you want, and there's little doubt that many people end up on the wrong side of 'how much is too much'. The amount of over-sharing on out there is staggering, while at the same time, there's an underlying assumption which says that if you don't put your information on the internet, you're safe, and it's that assumption I'd like to challenge, at least a little.
If you work for the Bodleian Libraries, anyone with an internet connection can find your email address. If your library has put up staff pictures, they can see what you look like. Even if you don't use Facebook, if you have friends who do, you could end up tagged in a picture, which would again appear in search results. Because of this, you don't always have control of what is being said about you on the internet, even if you personally don't sign up for anything. I recently went through the laborious process of editing my privacy settings on Facebook, so that only people I know can see my entries, but I'm not entirely sure that solves the problem. I'm also not defending this situation. It is frustrating when you haven't done anything to put yourself on the internet, but you end up there anyway. There's honestly not much that can be done about that, since as the world becomes more digitally oriented, more and more will be freely available to everyone, whether we want it to be or not.
What I would much rather is that when someone types my name into Google, the first result that comes up is one over which I have complete control. My LinkedIn profile, for example, or my professional Twitter account. In the modern world, a search engine is a common research tool for potential employers, and for me, I feel it's better that they find material that I have put on the internet, and I am happy for them to see. It can also help to mitigate a fairly common problem in the search engine age, which is that there are only so many names to go around. This is something I've been living with for a few years now, since I'm married to someone who shares his name with a well-known sportsman. We're used to giving the answer, "no, not that James Cracknell" by now, and yes, it has caused considerable confusion in the past (ask me about the emails some time). If someone who shares your name posts what I'll call inappropriate content on the internet, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Hopefully it will be fairly obvious to employers that your name-sharer isn't you, either through profession or geographical location or some other distinguishing feature, but having your own profile out there means that they can find out about you as opposed to all those other John Smiths out there.
I'm still not saying that all these tools are necessary for the modern world. They might be one day, but we're still a few years off that, I think. What I do think is that for most people, it does no harm to have your name on the internet connected to content that you have control of. For me, when I'm not sure about a service, I use an email account that's unconnected to any of my others. It's like having a spam email account, where all the newsletters and notifications can end up, while my actual email address goes to people I trust. The address can always be changed if I find the service is actually of use to me. You can also be highly selective about what you put out there, or just have a bare-bones profile in places that links back to a central hub like your blog, that really is 100% yours. Yes, these things require a little bit of thought, but it's something I think anyone who participated in 23 Things would be quite capable of doing.
One thing I heartily agree with from people's posts is that not all services are suitable for everyone, or even appropriate. Not all are suitable for libraries or a professional context. Part of the problem right now is that we don't know what's going to last and what isn't. When a couple of students turned their College Face Book into a website, they had no idea what they were creating (yes, that's how it got started), and it's possible that in a few year's time, Twitter will be last year's news and we'll all be using the Next Big Thing instead. Some technologies last - The Codex, the Printing Press, The PC, The Internet, The Mobile Phone - and some become dated pretty quickly - MySpace, anybody? - but with new things tumbling over each other right now, we as librarians have no way of knowing what's going to stick and what won't. So while these things are free and easy to use, why not try them out? If you're nervous about putting too much out there for everyone to see, then don't! If you're worried about a big corporation hanging on to your details, then stick to the ones that only ask for minimal information.
I would be interested to know why people find entering their details at places like LinkedIn so daunting. As someone who's fairly open in general, letting others see where I've worked and what my qualifications are isn't really a problem for me, but I know others are very put off by it. I'm genuinely interested in why, and what the arguments against it are.
Really excellent post. I think a lot of your points about control of information apply equally well to libraries - the example of the RSL with the 'really shitty library' facebook group is particularly apt here. People are going to put stuff about you on the internet anyway, so surely it's better that you have an official presence where you can control what you say, rather than just ignoring the whole thing.
ReplyDeleteAs to your question about putting personal details on LinkedIn etc, as someone who was a little wiggy about that site, but yet has put stuff about myself all over the internet, I'll try to answer. For me it goes back to your first point about pseudonymous versus real accounts. I also have three tiers of internet identity - the pseudonymous which I try to keep unlinked to me except to people that I trust, the personal real me, which I am happy to have connected to myself but am generally very careful about not making freely available, and the professional me, where I don't mind that it's public. As you say this tends to lead to a plethora of accounts to keep track of! Anyway, as I say, I am very careful about the personal me, and close down all the privacy settings to friends only. This caution can't help but bleed across when I come to my professional me, and where LinkedIn is concerned I felt it was asking for more information than I wanted to broadcast. I'm entirely happy with people knowing my *current* work position, work email etc - as you say, that's all public information already - but not so much with publicly broadcasting my entire history of work and qualifications. That is something I want to have control over who has access to it. However the great thing about these sites is that, to return to the bulk of your post, we can control what information we give out - as long as we're content to juggle the identities that result!
That makes a lot of sense. Out of interest, if you were job-hunting (something LinkedIn seems designed for), would you be more inclined to put more information on your LinkedIn profile as a sort of 'cover-all' CV? I know my husband doesn't like the idea, not so much for privacy, but because he'd want to send a tailored CV for each job rather than a general one. For the kind of thing I'd be applying for, I think all my experience would be relevant, so it bothers me less.
ReplyDeleteThanks :) Identity and privacy is something that comes up a lot in the pseudonymous circles I move in ('outing' people is the cardinal sin and seen as a seriosly malicious act), so I've had lots of time to think about it. I wasn't actually aware of that RSL group - that sucks! Controlling the message is so important - makes me think of the recent Labour advert where they had Cameron as Gene Hunt, and the Tories immediately came back with their own version of it. An American friend asked who'd come off better, and I honestly couldn't tell them, but I did get the impression that neither side *lost*. The Tories managed to wrestle back some of their image, but Labour still got the idea into people's heads. As we're in for a month of "controlling the message", I think it's something I'm hyper-aware of right now.
I think if I were job hunting then yes, I'd be inclined to put up more information, but I would probably take a lot of it down again afterwards (even knowing that of course it's cached, but it's not quite so easy to find), and I would still send tailored CVs too.
ReplyDeleteThe RSL group does still exist if you search for it, but it is old - dates back to the early days of Facebook in Oxford when groups were all the rage! James Shaw has written about it over on his blog, which I commented on at the time saying much the same as what you've said here.