Alyssa Roach
To Be Authentic or Not To Be
Boundaries are created to protect us, to keep what is on the inside of the dividing line safe from threats on the outside. Often we need to set up boundaries in our lives to keep our mental, emotional, and physical well being protected. Our digital lives however create a new frontier where we must navigate what we believe to be acceptable and unacceptable in regards to what information is available. Perhaps it is Valentine's Day still on my mind but I came back to one question when deciding how I felt information available about me online: “would I tell someone about this on a first date?” This was my red line. However after contemplating the potential threats I am exposing myself to by providing all this information online, I might need a new border.
Analysis
I have had social media since I was in middle school. I remember my parents hating the idea and my dad immediately warning me about Instagram’s ownership of my data. Being a 14 year old equipped with an iPad mini I ignored him but in the beginning did not post photos of myself. Slowly that rule became obsolete and the digital Alyssa Roach was born. You could have a first and even half of a second date with the trail of data I have left behind about myself. Age, birthday, hometown, current and pre-transfer college, major, job, family members, friends, roommates, the list goes on. So far it didn’t seem too bad. Doesn’t everyone have all that out there in the internet abyss now? Other than my misleading “first drink” post on my twenty-first birthday and some old Facebook photo dumps talking about how much I loved my pre-transfer university and sorority life, what I found about myself was accurate. This is because the information I could find regarding myself online was primarily controlled by me. My social media profiles are the largest source of information but with that you could likely find out a few more things using acquired facts such as my voting records and enough details to find my information on people lookup websites such as white pages. This is obviously not ideal that for the low price of $14.99 you could find my home address and a list of my relatives but if someone were going to these lengths to pick at every piece of data about me, there is a larger problem. So to answer my question: Yes so far I am okay about the data available about me and am pleased that it is accurate. Our online and physical personas slowly seem to be morphing into one another in our world and I want mine to blend seamlessly.
I have established that the facts about me online are accurate but is the online Alyssa Roach a digital embodiment of the physical one? I would, as many people would also, say that the online me is the best version of myself. Perfectly lit and edited photos with witty captions and friends admiring me in the comments on Instagram. Celebrating my internships, GPA, and strong work ethic on LinkedIn. Friends, parties, and laughter filling my Snapchat stories. Nonetheless I am human and this isn’t the entirety of my life. What is not shown is my battle with anxiety and depression, the struggles I had with managing online school and two internships, the death of my grandmother, and my coronavirus diagnosis. This is only to give an idea of what I left off social media in the past six months. Does this mean that the digital Alyssa is fake? No. I am proud of my accomplishments just as I am accepting of my failures, this does not mean I need to publicly broadcast them to strangers. The boundary I drew inherently lends itself to limit the amount of information I want about myself online. Although I can feel the online and physical world slowly consolidating around me, these parts of myself must remain guarded. Not because I am ashamed of them but because people should earn the privilege of seeing me from all angles. So is my digital persona authentic? That is to say, is it genuine and real without falsities? It’s difficult to say, we can see the moon but we are aware that there is a side that we cannot see. Perhaps my digital presence can be looked at the same way. I am a multi-dimensional human being and the internet only reflects some of those dimensions. Just as our limited view does not make the moon any less real, I believe myself to be authentic online. At the very least I remain true to my boundaries.
I discussed earlier that I first started using social media in middle school at fourteen years old. I am twenty one now. The very principle of my social media being stable for the past eight years during which I underwent major physical and mental changes is out of the question. I have matured and my online presence has matured with me. I consider my old postings to be less true than my recent ones. I used to treat my digital presence with the same level of importance of my being. If @alyssalroach on Instagram got hundreds of likes or had thousands of followers then my physical self was popular or worthy of some invisible award. My priorities have changed over the years and I no longer use my online statistics to measure myself worth. This change has been an improvement to my mental wellbeing as well as allowed me to show more angles of myself online. This switch happened less than three years ago. I feel it had a great deal to do with my studying data analytics at my first university. Big Data was an empty buzz word I considered when I asked myself: “how can I quantify this?” Everything in my life was numbers so it’s no surprise I latched onto my online quantities. When I got to University of Michigan I added a Cognitive Science major and now am trying to find my way as a human first computer scientist. Data doesn’t tell the whole story. This has manifested itself in my reduction in deleting posts because it was not receiving enough likes and lack of anxiety at decreasing follower counts. The performance measures I used when posting online have changed drastically over the course of my eight years online, so it is predictable that my presence would not remain stable. I take pride in this; As I have grown from my fourteen year old self my digital embodiment has too. I value the foundation of authenticity and accuracy I have created with myself and desire sharing some of the best moments of my life with others. As I move forward with social media and continue to grow as an individual, I only hope this value remains stable.
Threats
When I decided my boundary for information available online about me was “would I talk about this on a first date?”, I thought only of the positives. Seems like not too much information but just enough to get a sense of who I am. As I ruminated on this idea, I began to think about what this information could be used for. Moreover what could it be used for in the hand of someone with bad intentions. I am a huge true crime podcast fan and in a recent episode an FBI agent that specialized in interveiwing victims of human trafficking discussed some of the elaborate ways trafficers recruit. One included intercepting women who were set up and “stood up” for online dates. The trafficker would swoop in and keep the woman company in her vulnerable state of feeling played. I began to think about my own dating profiles and believe it would be possible to find another social media platform from this information. I recognize that if I were stood up for a date and an attractive man came up to me and began talking to me, relating to my interests that he could easily discover from my social media, connecting with me, I would be entirely enraptured and oblivious to any danger. The fact that I find myself authentic, accurate, and stable online seemed like a pride point to me, however I don’t want just anyone to be able to have a first date with my data.
Conclusion
Where does this leave me? What boundary can I set that will allow me to enjoy our digital world and keep my body and mind safe? At this moment of enlightenment I have an urge to take the extreme route of erasing the digital Alyssa Roach entirely. My data is out of my control and what felt like the freedom to share my best self now feels binding. The only way I can see a future for my online self is constantly expanding my knowledge on threats associated with my authentic data being public and keeping a robust defense strategy, online and off.
