Megha Jain
Joining Facebook at the age of 12 seemed like a life milestone at the time. I felt like I was entering a new world where I could stay connected with friends while spending my summers in India, and find and communicate with long distance family members while living in the U.S. Social media was something that was integral to my family because of how far we were from close relatives. After they immigrated, my parents utilized it to update their parents and siblings on their lives when phone calls were extremely expensive. As I have gotten older, social media has become integral to my life for the same reasons and more. With the time difference, my online presence is my way of sharing my experiences with my family without talking to them in the middle of the night. It has now progressed to a way to share my life with friends from home while at school and with friends at school while at home. In the midst of a pandemic, this is an especially important outlet that has grown tremendously.
Contents
My Online Identity
I was curious to explore who I am in the online world and if that identity resonated with me. I know that I have control over what I choose to share through my social media accounts, but how much control do I have over what search engines like "Google" and data broker websites like "Instant Checkmate" are programmed to associate with my name?
When searching my name on Google, I expected to find at least a couple results that directly pertained to me, considering that I am averagely active on social media and that I have an uncommon name. However, just searching "Megha Jain" produced no pictures, websites or accounts that represented my personal data - in fact, I looked through the first ten pages of Google results and found no trace of myself. When I tried searches adding my hometown as well as "umich" after my name, I was able to find more results that represented what I believed to be my online identity. Adding my hometown produced my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, work experiences like my recent internship and my hometown First Aid Squad, and images of me leading a protest in high school. Adding "umich" finally produced an identity that feels close to my 20-year old self. Although the second result belongs to a university Professor who shares a similar name (whose emails I receive quite frequently due to our similar uniqnames), the top results include my LinkedIn profile, an article on my run for CSG, organizations that I am a part of, and my major.
And if I pieced these together and ran a couple more searches with other identifiers like a job, "Ann Arbor", or an organization that I am a part of, I would probably produce an identity that resembled my own offline. However, Google, by itself, failed to do that.
Instant Checkmate
When accessing data broker website "Instant Checkmate" , the amount of information it promised to provide me coupled with the fact that I had to pay to access the data report they produced made me nervous as to how much information they would be able to find out about me. Was my personal information including my phone number, location, assets, work experience, licenses really so easily accessible? As the website continued to "extensively search their public records", I thought about my multiple social media accounts and how much information I put out into the online world without realizing. I was pleasantly surprised when Instant Checkmate could pull almost no information about me. Although they had found my date of birth, my star sign, my address, and my facebook account, their records had given me a middle initial even though I have no middle name. This left the rest of their data empty as they were searching for someone- associated with their initial information- that does not exist.
Social Media
Our social media presence is an interesting facet of our online identity because we have a lot of control over what we choose to present. Although we cannot control how others will interpret us based off of our content, that does not quite stray from real life- we have control over our actions and choices, but we cannot control what others think of us. While I am relatively active on my Instagram and Facebook accounts, based on the result from Google and Instant Checkmate, the information I provide there does not seem to have a huge impact on my public online presence. My private one, however, allows me to share my life with friends and family and, therefore, includes more details like recent pictures, interests, organizations that I'm involved in, fundraisers that I am passionate about, and other daily updates that reflect the progression of my life.
Based off this, there an interesting distinguishment to be made between our private and public online identities, and what we can truly classify as our online presence.
