Zwanziger Blog #

Blog #6

Googling yourself is something that everyone has done at least once in their lives. Don’t lie. You’ve done it. And that actually probably a good thing. From googling myself this time I learned a lot about the information that is out there on the internet about me. For me though, I was googling my “real name” instead of my “online name”. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I had a really bad stalker throughout my senior year of high school and encountered some pretty bad digital drama. Scheinbaum describes digital drama as “the occurrence of and reactions to online consumer behaviors such as sexting, cyberbullying, fear of missing out, abuse, and related online happenings” (Scheinbaum). For me, I was unfortunately a part of a bad stalker that would send me death threats and would harass me and my family online. I actually at that time had two stalkers (one in real life who I went to school with and one that was online). Because of these stalker incidents, the police advised me that from then on out if I were not going to stop using social media, that I should use a different name online. For me, I really only changed my last name and shortened it from what it regularly is. From that point on I had tried to distance myself from everything online that contained my real last name for safety purposes. So, after googling myself online, I did not find that much stuff about me. Although that is a good thing, I was surprised ot see of how little online identity I really had with my real name. Hodapp explains online identity as “the establishment of character and self for individual persons” (Hodapp). While I had essentially tried throughout my high school and college years to erase my digital footprint with everything with my real name on it, I was surprised to see that there were still websites that were showing up.

The first website that showed up when I searched my real name was my LinkedIn account. I chose to use my real name on this account for obvious purposes (I want employers to know my real name and not a name I created for myself because of my stalker) but I did not think that this would be the first thing that would show up when I googled my name. In fact, I was a little taken aback that I did not realize how much this website told about my life. For some reason I had always thought that my account was private, or maybe I just was not sure how LinkedIn really worked. Within just clicking on the webpage I was able to see everything about myself, where I have previously and currently work, where I attend college, and where I interned with in high school. While this may not seem like a big deal, it really was an eye-opening experience to me. Because of the stalker that I had encountered in my real life (the one I went to high school with) I had tried to keep which college I attend as private as I could in fear that he would show up to campus one day. Another big problem with this was also my online stalker, which could know in an instant where I lived (or the area near where I live) and where I go to college. For me, this website just held a little bit too much personal information for me to be comfortable with.The next website that showed up was Facebook, which was not that much of a surprise to me. While I had changed my name on all of my social media sites, this was one that I kept with my real name (mainly for my family to be able to find me and friend me). This one was not that scary to me because I have always had pretty good privacy settings on it, so when I clicked on my page no information showed up. You were essentially only able to see my profile picture (which hasn’t been changed in a couple of years because I unfortunately got locked out of my Facebook account and still have been unable to get back into).The next site that showed up in my searches were three different Pinterest accounts. I do not remember making three Pinterest accounts, but I am pretty bad with getting locked out of accounts or forgetting passwords, so I am not that surprised. Nothing that showed up on my Pinterest page was that concerning for me, as the only things that I pin on there are home inspiration or home décor ideas.

Something that was pretty shocking to me was the amount of Christopher Newport University related websites that showed up when I searched my name. I did not think that there would be that much information that my college was posting that would be tied back to my name, but I was really surprised. There were at least two websites near the end of the search list that were both from CNU that had my name in them. This was shocking to me as well, especially if you are trying to keep you whereabouts private. I never thought that if someone just searched my name that they would be able to so easily track where I was. I think to me, this was one of the most unsettling searches to discover, mainly because I was unaware that it was even taking place in the first place.

The next search that I wanted to discuss, was when I searched my name in google pictures. The first thing that showed up was my profile picture for my LinkedIn account, which I was not that surprised about mainly because that was the first result for when I searched my name. However, there were many other results that shocked me more. For one, when I scrolled down the page a little bit I saw a picture of my father, which was surprising because it was not a picture that I had taken of him. Instead, it was a picture of a video that he was in that promoted one of his friend’s companies. The next thing that was shocking for me to see was a picture of my great-grandmother who had passed away. This picture was from her obituary that was posted after she had passed, but I was incredibly surprised to see it show up when I searched my name. While both of these things may not be that important to the random person who searched my name (if anyone out there is), but it was shocking to me because these were two members of my family.

Overall, googling yourself every once in a while, is a pretty shocking thing to do and I think that everyone should do it at least once to see their results!

                        

Works Cited:

Hodapp, C. (2017). Identity, the internet, and masculine discourse. Men’s Rights, Gender, And

                         Social Media. Lanham, Maryland. Lexington Books.

Scheinbaum, A. C. A framework for the dark side of social media: From digital drama to digital

                         over-engagement.