Difference between revisions of "Ethan Aziz"

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==Expectations==
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Like most people around my age, I grew up connected in the [[Infosphere]], which is an environment populated by informational entities called inforgs). In elementary school and middle school, I had access to computers where I would make accounts and publish data of me online.  I got my first smart-phone in middle school and, as social media became more popular, I started using social media.  My parents always told me to be careful of what you put online since "once you put it online it stays there forever", so I was always conscious of what I would put online or on social media.  Due to this and my eventual indifference towards posting social media, I barely posted on social media and believe that most of the data I would find online about me would be from old highschool events or from playing tennis, which is also from the same period of time.  Therefore, I believe that my online Data Identity will not be reflective of who I am today, but merely static uploads, like screenshots, from past events in my life.  Additionally, I believe that an accumulation of these screenshots will paint a narrow view of myself growing up.
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===Re-Ontologiziation of the Infosphere===
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In [[Luciano Floridi]]'s ''Ethics After the Information Revolution''<ref> Floridi, Luciano. (2010). “Ethics after the Information Revolution”. The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics. Cambridge University Press. </ref>, he elaborates on how ICT's(Information and Communication Technologies) have and are re-ontologizing the Infosphere An example of this is with the dominance of social media in daily life.  Due to the re-ontologization my online data identity may have more of an impact in my life to other's than my actual identity.  This is a concerning idea since my online data identity is most likely not representative of my current self.
  
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==Introduction==
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==Google Search==
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[[File:Portfolium.png|thumbnail|right|Portfolium profile for an internship]]
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I started with a simple google search for my name, "Ethan Aziz". A third of the results on the first page were actually about me, with all of them in the first four results.  I was surprised to see this as when I searched my name years ago, I remember maybe seeing one or two results relevant to me and then the rest were about Aziz Ansari. The three records about me were all my social media, which were LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, respectively.  This is somewhat unsurprising in that they are some of the things I browse on the most, but I also rarely post on these platforms.
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A Google search for my full name brings up three hits — my Sweetland Tutoring Consultant profile, my Linkedin, and a link to a Portfolium account containing a presentation I was forced to make as a part of a summer course. One might assume that these three hits indicate that my digital self is a singularly business-focused student intent on presenting the most professional version of herself to the world. That couldn’t be further from the truth.  [[File:Sweetland.png|thumbnail|right|My Sweetland Consultant Profile]]
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===Social Medias===
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==== LinkedIn====
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[[File:EazizLinkedIn.png|thumbnail|right|My linkedIn profile page]]
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This was the very first result that popped up in my google search and it reflects my academic and professional life.  I think that my linkedIn has the most information about me, especially current information, than anywhere else that I would know about.  If someone I didn't know asked me what online resource contained the most information about me, I would say linkedIn.  It is the culmination of a headshot, where I went/go to school, where I've worked in the past, my technical skills, and more. 
  
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Of these three hits, I’d consider my Sweetland profile to be the most genuine version of me. I hold the job itself very near and dear to my heart. I consider writing to be one of the most personal things you can do — even more intimate than speaking, and writing consulting means that you often work with other undergraduate students at varying stages of stress and vulnerability. My Sweetland profile, therefore, is a good balance of casual and professional, which is exactly how I try to approach writing consulting.
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While all of this information is authentic as it is all true information about me, it is not all-encompassing.  I certainly like to think that I focus on academics and my professional career, but this is the result of targeted wording in my bio and job descriptions to project the image I want others to see about me. The ideas on here are very stable as they are all positive and career oriented.  I think my linkedIn functions as a great piece in current information about me, but is not a complete standalone resource.
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====Instagram and Facebook====
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Instagram is one my most used social medias, but I don't post on it, while I don't use Facebook at all.  All a person could gain about me from going onto my profiles is my profile picture and a short bio.  In the context of data mining, people would learn the most about me and would get a somewhat holistic view of me through my Instagram, but a normal person would not gain any information relevant to who I am today and only a slight amount of who I was when I made the account.
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===Keyword Searches===
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[[File:eazizTennis.jpg|thumbnail|right|My sophomore year of highschool after our regional championship]]
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I then decided to search in google for my name coupled with keywords to try and find more information to try and create a more complete view of myself.  I searched for "Ethan Aziz grosse pointe" and "Ethan Aziz tennis".  This is my name coupled with my hometown and the sport I played the most growing up.  I found a few pages of myself in my high school's paper and also I found a lot of articles of old high school tennis match results and summaries of myself throughout my highschool career.  Additionally, I found USTA and team tennis histories from 2012-2014.  I wasn't expecting to find as much as I did about myself with tennis and highschool, especially the team tennis information because of how old it was. I also didn't expect to find any information of myself at all of when i was younger than fifteen.  All of this information is over five years old and was very representative of my interests outside of the classroom at the time. I think this builds a complete and authentic view image of a younger me.
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==Conclusion==
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I was surprised to see how much information actually was out there about me on the internet as I don't put much info out personally, but I was expecting my online image to be that of narrow view of a younger me.  The information I gathered comprised mainly of an academic and professional current me, also with a younger me.  This shows that my online image is not stable since it changed as time passed, but it does do a relatively good job in getting authentic information about myself.  Additionally, while all of this information is authentic, I did find a lot of information that wasn't about me but still showed up when I was doing my google searches.  Because of this, an average person that doesn't know me would have a hard time deciphering between Ethan Aziz, the student and tennis player, and other Ethan Aziz's, such as the Canadian highschool basketball player who has a state ranking of #2.  I wasn't able to find anything negative about myself or anything related to my struggles, which I thought was very interesting but also made sense.  People usually only put information about themselves online willingly if it portrays them in a positive light.  I didn't find anything about how I was a transfer student from Michigan State(yes, I know) after my freshman year of college or anything related to how I've grown personally over the years.  Yes, the data about me is accurate and is/was relevant at one point in time, but there is never enough total information about me to gain a well rounded view of who I actually am.  What is seen of me is an academic student who used to play a lot of tennis.  This has a big impact on how I'm perceived throughout the infosphere due to the re-ontologization of it from social media.  An example of the implications of this is how most people look other people up on social media before they meet someone in person.  Someone looking up myself beforehand would not see me for who I am currently.  If I could find more information of my current self that isn't academic related and some of my transitions or struggles(such as transferring schools), I would believe that a person could gain a lot of relevant knowledge about me and make for a more complete image.  
  
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Still, these three profiles are a very narrow slice of who I am. I love Sweetland, but it’s not the only extracurricular I have (and in fact, is somewhat different from my focus as a student in the School of Information). I loathe Linkedin wholeheartedly, and if it weren’t required for job applications, I’d delete my profile and never look back. I barely even remember what I put on the presentation for the last hit. I think the main reason for this is because I usually go by Sam and only use Samantha when the situation requires it, so a search for “Samantha Lu” quite naturally filters out all of the parts of myself that I enjoy — my hobbies, passions, talents, and the social media image that I (used to) try to tailor.
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==References==
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<references>
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A search for “Sam Lu University of Michigan” is also somewhat unsuccessful. Evidently, there’s a Samuel Lu who graduated from U of M’s College of Engineering in 2016, which was incidentally my first semester on campus. This could certainly be confusing for anyone who didn’t know that I am, indeed, but a small girl. The only hit is a link to my UX Design portfolio, where I redesigned Wolverine Access as a personal project. Again, this is somewhat bland, and doesn’t really give any insight as to who I am. Perhaps one could conclude that Sam Lu is an undergraduate aspiring to break into UX Design after she escapes from college, again, a conclusion that supports the idea that digital me is very much focused on her future.
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==Data Broker Report + Mistaken Identities==
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[[File:Columbia.png|thumbnail|right|Samantha Lu from Columbia University]] [[File:Searchsam.png|thumbnail|right|Images search results]]
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My data broker report from Instant Checkmate wasn’t me. It was Samantha Lu from Okemos, Michigan, who also happened to be 21 years old. Other than name and age, we shared nothing in common — our middle names, parents, and associates didn’t match up, which is why I assumed this Samantha was an entirely different person. The bulk of the report was about sex offenders nearby.
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Reading this Databroker Report was somewhat unsettling, particularly the portion labelled “Dates Seen at Address” under “Possible Locations.” If I wanted to, I could travel up to Okemos and confront this digital Samantha in real life. But who has the time for that? This exact thought could apply to me too. Sure, if someone looked really hard, they would probably be able to find identifying information about me, including my address. But what would drive someone to take the time to act on this information? In this instance, being mistaken for someone else actually benefits me. Okemos is pretty far from the small Michigan town that I grew up in, and even further from Ann Arbor, where I currently reside.
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There’s another Samantha Lu who comes up as the first result in my Googling — a middle-aged woman who is the Associate Director of Columbia University’s Student Advising team. I wonder if I've ever been confused for her!
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Google Images actually turns up a few accurate results, including the picture from my Sweetland profile and my LinkedIn profile.
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==Social Media Use==
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===Past Usage===
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[[File:Fbsam.png|thumbnail|right|14-year-old me's Facebook statuses]]
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The bulk of my social media journey started in my freshman year of high school, when I first created my Facebook account way back in 2012. 14-year-old me started a firestorm of cringey Facebook statuses, including (but not limited to) “Truth is” posts, musings about life, and oddly aggressive declarations, peppered with caps lock, of course.
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14-year-old me’s Facebook reflects a shallow, attention-focused person. Nearly every one of my status updates and posts are specifically designed to elicit an audience response of some sort, whether it's the "like my status for a truth is!" or an aggressive selfie with an intentionally casual caption. The caps lock I used for my status updates in particular signifies either an inability (or unwillingness) to communicate deeper levels of thought and reason, along with an unwillingness to keep things private. But there’s a sort of shameless confidence implicit in these artifacts. If I thought my sentences were interesting enough to broadcast them in caps lock, regardless of how relevant this content actually was to the rest of my Facebook friends, I must have had a lot of gall. This is a marked departure from my current favorite mode of communication — all-lowercase text messaging — and my comparatively low-key social media habits today. I think the biggest difference is that I've begun to care less and less about what digital me is like. That is, the older I get, the more I realize everyone is merely putting on a facade.
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===Present Usage===
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I haven’t made a Facebook status in years. In fact, in recent months, I’ve deactivated or deleted a majority of my accounts, including my Instagram and Snapchat. I’ve thought a lot about how I spend my time, especially as graduation looms nearer and I’m forced to consider what post-graduation me will do with her time when she’s not working. One major reason was that the digital version of myself has little to no impact on my real-life self — the way I conceptualize it, digital me is merely a way to distract from the day to day. Time spent on Instagram’s endless scroll is just time I could have spent reading or doing something else that has more measurable returns than a time suck.
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Quitting most social media has made me reevaluate who I spend my time with and why. If our only interaction was to send stone-faced selfies to one another on Snapchat, abandoning that platform altogether means that I no longer interact with that person, period. But if selfies were the only communication between us, was that acquaintanceship really anything meaningful? More specifically, if the only version of me someone interacts with is surface-level digital me, then where does real-life me come in?
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===Philosophy Behind Use Change===
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If I had to further explain why I started closing down my digital self, I'd probably say something more along the lines of what philosopher Luciano Floridi suggests about human self-understanding. He frames the past three revolutions as ultimately centered on human perception and argues that we're in the midst of a fourth revolution that actually emphasizes how informational human identities are (Floridi 96). Floridi also suggests that the current generation is possibly the last to experience a clear distinction between offline and online states.
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I think that's the biggest driver for my departure from social media. In past years, I've noticed that the rush of happiness from offline experiences is beginning to pale next to the excitement I derive from an abundance of likes on an Instagram photo or the number of views on a Snapchat story. I struggle to immerse myself in books the way that I used to. ''There just isn't enough time'' is what I tell myself. At first, it was extremely difficult to pull myself out of the attention-seeking mindset I'd so deeply fallen into (I had a 900-day Snapchat streak! There are extracurricular events on Facebook that I can't miss!), but I found that once I deleted or deactivated those platforms, I soon forgot about them. Without repeatedly fueling my obsession with my digital self, I began to prioritize my offline self a bit more, and in the process, I '''have''' found that I understand a bit more about who I am, how I operate, and my relation to the world around me (as per Floridi's argument). I spend more time journalling, thinking about what kind of future I want for myself, and even recognizing that value close personal friendships more than surface-level acquaintanceships.
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Maybe it's futile. Digital technology is undeniably woven into my life, and I spend most of my waking moments interacting with it, whether that is checking my email, doing my homework, or listening to music, so I'm not truly offline after all. I guess it doesn't matter to me in the end, because (for me at least) it's no longer possible to go offline and still fully engage with the world — I know I'd be missing out on a lot of information, knowledge, and connection. I've accepted that staying logged in is the price I have to pay to interact with other people and information entities the way that I want to.
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==Looking Forward==
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Someone who had full access to my digital footprint would be able to precisely follow my use habits over the past eight years as I began to show less and less of myself in the virtual world. If your only concept of me was virtual, you wouldn’t have a very accurate or authentic picture of who I am, and I prefer it that way. Even if someone managed to find one of my defunct social media accounts, I probably wouldn't care very much — there's nothing incriminating out there about me, at least that I know of. Digital me has yet to impede real-life me!
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The data broker couldn’t find any useful or accurate information, which I’ll take to mean that my attempts to stay under the radar have worked pretty well so far. It’s always easier to reveal more about yourself as time goes on than it is to reveal too much and delete what’s saved online about you.
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== References ==
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“Self-Understanding.” ''The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality'', by Luciano Floridi, Oxford University Press, 2014.
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Latest revision as of 21:47, 5 March 2021

Expectations

Like most people around my age, I grew up connected in the Infosphere, which is an environment populated by informational entities called inforgs). In elementary school and middle school, I had access to computers where I would make accounts and publish data of me online. I got my first smart-phone in middle school and, as social media became more popular, I started using social media. My parents always told me to be careful of what you put online since "once you put it online it stays there forever", so I was always conscious of what I would put online or on social media. Due to this and my eventual indifference towards posting social media, I barely posted on social media and believe that most of the data I would find online about me would be from old highschool events or from playing tennis, which is also from the same period of time. Therefore, I believe that my online Data Identity will not be reflective of who I am today, but merely static uploads, like screenshots, from past events in my life. Additionally, I believe that an accumulation of these screenshots will paint a narrow view of myself growing up.

Re-Ontologiziation of the Infosphere

In Luciano Floridi's Ethics After the Information Revolution[1], he elaborates on how ICT's(Information and Communication Technologies) have and are re-ontologizing the Infosphere An example of this is with the dominance of social media in daily life. Due to the re-ontologization my online data identity may have more of an impact in my life to other's than my actual identity. This is a concerning idea since my online data identity is most likely not representative of my current self.

Google Search

I started with a simple google search for my name, "Ethan Aziz". A third of the results on the first page were actually about me, with all of them in the first four results. I was surprised to see this as when I searched my name years ago, I remember maybe seeing one or two results relevant to me and then the rest were about Aziz Ansari. The three records about me were all my social media, which were LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, respectively. This is somewhat unsurprising in that they are some of the things I browse on the most, but I also rarely post on these platforms.

Social Medias

LinkedIn

My linkedIn profile page

This was the very first result that popped up in my google search and it reflects my academic and professional life. I think that my linkedIn has the most information about me, especially current information, than anywhere else that I would know about. If someone I didn't know asked me what online resource contained the most information about me, I would say linkedIn. It is the culmination of a headshot, where I went/go to school, where I've worked in the past, my technical skills, and more.

While all of this information is authentic as it is all true information about me, it is not all-encompassing. I certainly like to think that I focus on academics and my professional career, but this is the result of targeted wording in my bio and job descriptions to project the image I want others to see about me. The ideas on here are very stable as they are all positive and career oriented. I think my linkedIn functions as a great piece in current information about me, but is not a complete standalone resource.

Instagram and Facebook

Instagram is one my most used social medias, but I don't post on it, while I don't use Facebook at all. All a person could gain about me from going onto my profiles is my profile picture and a short bio. In the context of data mining, people would learn the most about me and would get a somewhat holistic view of me through my Instagram, but a normal person would not gain any information relevant to who I am today and only a slight amount of who I was when I made the account.

Keyword Searches

My sophomore year of highschool after our regional championship

I then decided to search in google for my name coupled with keywords to try and find more information to try and create a more complete view of myself. I searched for "Ethan Aziz grosse pointe" and "Ethan Aziz tennis". This is my name coupled with my hometown and the sport I played the most growing up. I found a few pages of myself in my high school's paper and also I found a lot of articles of old high school tennis match results and summaries of myself throughout my highschool career. Additionally, I found USTA and team tennis histories from 2012-2014. I wasn't expecting to find as much as I did about myself with tennis and highschool, especially the team tennis information because of how old it was. I also didn't expect to find any information of myself at all of when i was younger than fifteen. All of this information is over five years old and was very representative of my interests outside of the classroom at the time. I think this builds a complete and authentic view image of a younger me.

Conclusion

I was surprised to see how much information actually was out there about me on the internet as I don't put much info out personally, but I was expecting my online image to be that of narrow view of a younger me. The information I gathered comprised mainly of an academic and professional current me, also with a younger me. This shows that my online image is not stable since it changed as time passed, but it does do a relatively good job in getting authentic information about myself. Additionally, while all of this information is authentic, I did find a lot of information that wasn't about me but still showed up when I was doing my google searches. Because of this, an average person that doesn't know me would have a hard time deciphering between Ethan Aziz, the student and tennis player, and other Ethan Aziz's, such as the Canadian highschool basketball player who has a state ranking of #2. I wasn't able to find anything negative about myself or anything related to my struggles, which I thought was very interesting but also made sense. People usually only put information about themselves online willingly if it portrays them in a positive light. I didn't find anything about how I was a transfer student from Michigan State(yes, I know) after my freshman year of college or anything related to how I've grown personally over the years. Yes, the data about me is accurate and is/was relevant at one point in time, but there is never enough total information about me to gain a well rounded view of who I actually am. What is seen of me is an academic student who used to play a lot of tennis. This has a big impact on how I'm perceived throughout the infosphere due to the re-ontologization of it from social media. An example of the implications of this is how most people look other people up on social media before they meet someone in person. Someone looking up myself beforehand would not see me for who I am currently. If I could find more information of my current self that isn't academic related and some of my transitions or struggles(such as transferring schools), I would believe that a person could gain a lot of relevant knowledge about me and make for a more complete image.

References

  1. ↑ Floridi, Luciano. (2010). “Ethics after the Information Revolution”. The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics. Cambridge University Press.
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