User:Lijame

Growing up, daily use of the internet has almost been ingrained in me. I find it natural to look up questions I have on search engines, and while I personally don’t use social media that much, it’s easy to connect with people that you don’t normally talk to by hitting them up through a platform. My introduction to social media and having an online presence began with a Yahoo! email account that my mom helped me make, but I didn’t start having identifiable information online until I was allowed to make a Facebook account, where I posted a few profile pictures, and volunteered basic information about myself. My social media identity grew along with my actual identity, and with it my use of social media has ebbed and flowed. Nowadays, I’m present on a lot of social media platforms, even if I don’t regularly use their apps, and because of this, Context However, unfortunately, or maybe not, for me, my name is exceedingly common. Li is the most common Chinese surname, and James is also one of the most popular boys names. When I search my name up on search engines, it is initially difficult to find any results pertaining to me specifically. Because of this, there is both a sense of relief and frustration. On one hand, it’s easier for me to blend into the masses, and I have the right to be forgotten, because my search results will never crowd out the hundreds of other James Lis with an online presence. On the other hand, this makes it a lot harder to stand out, or to simply find out Search Engines For someone with a name as common as mine, scrolling through the first page of Google Images reveals a broad array of different James Lis, each living their own life. To find any specific details, I need to add specific identifiers in my query, like the high school I went to, or my hometown. Even if I add “umich” as a tag, I don’t appear in the first page of results, or for the first page of images either. The most common results from narrowing down my searches to find myself end up being high school competitions I’ve competed in. Even though I only ran one year of track in high school, my records are still online, and looking them up brought back a wave of nostalgia. My old biology and math competitions resurface as well, and in doing so remind me that there is an archive of everything that I’ve competed in. The image that Google has built up of me is very surface level, as its hard for my social media profiles to surface over other James Lis, who may have more followers or connections. Because of this, and me having to add specifiers in my query, it’s possible that this is a skewed view of my online identity, and an inaccurate representation of my data online. However, being as these were the most accessible ways to see information about myself, and the only methods I’ve found that work well so far, I see this as a product of the search engine algorithms rather than a flawed methodology. This reveals that my online persona, at least through search engines, seems to be heavily weighted toward my high school actions, which doesn’t accurately convey my present interests or being as a person. Data Brokers Analysis