William Babbitt
I am William McClure Babbitt. I was born in Lansing, Michigan on November 12th 1999 to my parents Pamela McClure Babbitt and William Eric Babbitt. I spent the majority of my life living at either my house in Eaton Rapids, Michigan where I attended Eaton Rapids Public Schools, or at my family cabin in Boyne Falls, Michigan. When I graduated high school I moved to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan where I am studying Computer Science. This is, in a way, who I am. However, I would like to say that there is much more to me.
We are all in part made by what we surround ourselves with. Our friends, family, interests, and more all define who we are. For me, that means that I am largely defined by a love for computers and the internet, my rather large extended family, and a collection of hobbies ranging from tennis to tabletop RPGs. This is what I expected to find when searching for myself online, and in a way is what I found, but I did not expect to see how disjoint of an impression I have left on the web.
My presence on the internet is one of disconnected points, making a total picture of who I am difficult for someone to gain. This, I believe, is typical of how people are shown on the internet, and is something that leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of people in the modern world.
Contents
The Search for Me
As I began searching the internet a few things became immediately apparent. For starters I quickly ran into the issue that I am named after my dad. He goes by his middle name so it’s rarely an issue, but when searching for things I kept finding results related to him as well as myself, or even at times mixed results where a site thought we were the same person. Interestingly though, I found roughly equal amounts of information about both of us, despite him being 40 years older than me and thus having the potential to have a much bigger presence in the world. I assume that this is because despite our age differences we have had roughly the same amount of time on the internet.
Another surprise was that there actually wasn’t huge amounts of information available about me if I just naively searched my name. In order to find most of the information I found, I actually needed to provide additional information about myself. For example searching both my name and my home city, my various schools, or hobbies that I knew were related to me. This is in a way comforting because it means that someone would have to know a decent bit about me to find all the information that I have.
Lastly I decided that along with searching for my real name, I would try to find information about usernames and aliases that I use online. As I said in the introduction I have been very into computers and the internet since I was a small child, so I was curious what digital footprints I had left behind. I found that these searches revealed far more about me than the ones for my real life.
My Real Name
As said before I began my search by looking for my real name. Starting with simple searches of “William Babbitt” in Google. I was actually somewhat surprised how prevalent I was in these searches compared to the last time I had Googled myself. I found several of my public accounts including Linkedin (the first result), Facebook, and Instagram. I also saw that going to the image results did show some pictures of me, although only profile pictures from various accounts.
I then expanded this search by adding on more identifying information that I knew was related to me. This was when I saw a divergence in how I am represented online. There is the “Old Me”, old accounts and results from my time in High School or before, and the “Modern Me”, accounts that I maintain and results related to me as I am now.
The Old Me
The results that I will call part of the “Old Me” were interesting. First off I had several accounts that I no longer use or maintain that were very prevalent. This included my Facebook page which is a mix of public (anyone can see it) and semi-private (limited to friends) information. This by far and away has the most information about me of any of these old accounts. I no longer use Facebook other than as a login for other online accounts, but it has information including my birthday, where I went/go to school, the family business that I worked at, Where I’m from, the name of my girlfriend, the names of family member, and many photos of me both that I posted and ones that I was tagged in. Not to mention the many posts that I made back in the day when I was around 13 years old. This was a bit surprising to me to see how much of this information was still on my Facebook. I’ve never been someone to closely protect information about myself, but I didn’t realize how public this old account still was.
The fact that this account was no longer used also created an interesting situation. Not only was this information public, but in places it was wrong. For example I never changed where I live to Ann Arbor, I still had old books, movies, quotes, and more listed as my “Favorites” when I hadn’t seen or read some of them since middle school. This left me feeling oddly exposed, and somewhat embarrassed, by this information. It is one thing to accept the lack of privacy the internet often necessitates, but for the lack of privacy to push a version of myself that is no longer true out into the world felt wrong.
This feeling was expanded upon when I came across many things related to my life in High School. I found several archived newspaper articles with my name on them related to my academics and extracurriculars in school, records of my rather poor performance on my school's tennis team, a long abandoned website for my school’s robotics team, and more. All of these presented this image of who I was in high school. A time capsule of that part of my life, sitting out there waiting to be looked at.
