Blog 6

For this I used my mom's iPad to look myself up on safari. When doing this blog/ experiment the first thing I found was that when you first search my name there are a bunch of famous doctors and priests and stuff that come up first, so at least I am not that easy to find. The first thing of mine that actually came up was my Facebook. The browser gave me the option to view Facebook profiles with this name, but I ended up having to scroll through like 100 profiles just to find mine. I guess Simon Robson is a much more common name in places like the United Kingdom or New Zealand and Australia. Once I finally found my profile the immediate information given when I clicked on it was my name, my hometown, my high school, and it said that I liked football. Once I clicked on it it began to show me a little more, and it was mostly outdated information due to the fact that I have barely used Facebook since middle school. It showed some of the birthday posts and things that other people had put on my wall and of course it showed my profile picture and header. However, when I tried to go to my pictures it did not show anything. This is probably a good thing considering more of my pictures of Facebook are terrible pictures that family tagged me in or memes I posted in 6th grade. Both of which I will include here:

 

My Facebook profile did not give a lot of information due to the privacy settings I have, but it definitely gave enough information to be somewhat dangerous considering it gave my name, image and my hometown. Maybe this is something that I need to look into editing my information on. 

After not finding too much on my facebook I went on to whatever popped up next in the search results. The only issue was that I kept scrolling and scrolling and none of my other profiles popped up, so I went back to the search bar and typed “Simon Robson Instagram”. Ironically, my instagram account wasn’t one of the first ones to come up so I scrolled down and came to my twitter account before my instagram. When I went to my twitter account I realized that I do not have any privacy barriers here even though I kind of assumed I did. I don’t feel as if any of the information here is harmful for other people to be able to see but I do think that privacy is important in a lot of ways. Also although I don’t tweet a lot I sometimes retweet stuff that isn’t the most PG so it would be better to adjust my privacy settings. SInce I don’t tweet very much most of what I saw here was retweets I thought were funny along with my basic profile information such as my name, picture and when I joined twitter. It was also interesting to see that the twitter website gave a preview of my photos on the side of the screen, but when I tried to go to media it would not let me until I signed into an account. This made me feel a little better even though there is nothing in my media besides pictures I have posted for friends' birthdays and a snowboarding video I made with my friends back in the day. Hopefully I can link the video in here but beware there is about .5 seconds of someones butt.

https://twitter.com/SimonRobson44/status/825796064565456896?s=20

The one part of my twitter that is slightly concerning however is my likes. Here you can find some of my worst humor and maybe even a little bit of simping. If you’re not familiar with the term simping it is it is basically sucking up to a girl in order to get her to like you, so mostly I’m just referring to liking tweets and pictures from girls I find attractive. It’s a lifestyle. However, I was happy to see that twitter had the same function here and would at least make someone sign in before seeing my likes. 

Then I moved on to  try to find my instagram. As I scrolled I still didn’t see my profile so I went ahead and typed in “simonrobson44 instagram”. When I got to it I wasn’t too surprised with what I found. I have all my privacy settings turned off for instagram because although I use it for my personal life pictures I also use it to promote my photography, so I keep it public. Obviously it tells my name and in my bio I have CNU ‘21 and ΣΦΕ along with a link to my VSCO profile. It shows my number of followers and how many people I am following. My last few posts are of me and my life, but after scrolling down a little you can see some of my photography and my travel pictures. When posting on instagram I usually am more cautious because 1. I know it is public and anyone can see anything and 2. My parents follow me so I kind of have to be. I also found that when I tried to go to pictures I was tagged in it would make me sign in, similar to twitter. 

 

Overall, I found that I have definitely left somewhat of a social media footprint, but I don’t think it is as much as it definitely could be. I am more of a viewer on social media than someone who posts a lot. I still believe that some of my accounts such as my twitter probably need to have the privacy settings adjusted and my Facebook needs to have some information changed or removed. I’ve always believed that it is important to take your privacy online seriously. I have always been freaked out by the idea of the maps function on snapchat that allows people to see where you are all the time. I also think that one of the reasons I am not as prevalent on social media is because I don’t necessarily believe in hashtag activism and things of that nature. In the article “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States.” by Bonilla, Yarimar, and Jonathan Rosa they talk about the hashtag activism and the impacts that it can really make. I however have never felt the need to engage politics or anything of that nature on social media. I have never felt that I personally could make any change through something I post, and rather it would just annoy people. 

In the end I was not too concerned with my privacy on the internet, even though I found some things I need to adjust. I am somewhat glad I am not more involved on social media because as a result I have less of a social media footprint. I’m glad that I take my internet privacy somewhat seriously and I hope that as a result of this I will never have to face any unexpected consequences from it!

References:

Bonilla, Y., & Rosa, J. (2015). #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics

of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist, 42(1), 4–17. doi: 10.1111/amet.12112