Unit Structures Fred Stutzman’s thoughts about information, social networks and technology.

Pew Report on Digital Identity

The Pew Internet and American Life project has released a new report: Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency. This report examines our relationship with our online information, stuff like our Google results and the information we’ve presented online. There are a number of interesting findings, and to an extent it is somewhat of a reality check. Amongst my cohort, we’re very aware of our online identities; the report proves that this is not an evenly distributed phenomenon (it is widespread nonetheless). I found this chart interesting:

This illustrates the unmet potential of the net: we’re largely engaging in a simple search task, looking for simple information – stuff like contact information. Perhaps the notion of SNS as Rolodex is its mainstream potential!

The report provides a nuanced look at this complex and emergent topic – something I view as a long-term problem for the information sciences. As Web 2.0 and social networks incite broad participation, there will be more of us with our trails online. Good or bad, this will force many of us to address the identities we’ve created online. This Pew data provides an interesting foundation for studies of this matter going forward.

Download the report in PDF.

Among writers, the practice of going to the card catalog in each library that we visited and looking up ourselves and our friends was/is called “Whitmanizing” (”I celebrate myself, and sing myself”). Google News alerts do the same now for folks with less common names. The more earnest, more curious and perhaps more insecure writers would call for their books to see how often those books were checked out — if ever.

Now we have stats on others that see us (in the collective). We become reputation managers mostly after the fact constructing our identities again and again. (Here I go myself).

Management is one issue, but the more important issue will be how we learn to read not only our reputation, our digital footprints, but what level of literacy we attain in reading those of others as we come to grips with the shifting nature of identities and of the performance of those identities across time and circumstance.

Am I the only one surprised to see that as many people have been looking for legal information or a photo? It sounds very peculiar to look for such info, outside of a professional context (and I’m assuming only a few would) or dating; in the second case, people would most likely look for a photo too. In the meantime, photos are the key feature in all SNS