There’s a great post over at Swift Kick Central covering some important issues about digital identity management. It hits on a lot of things I bring up in my senior thesis about the merging of information-systems (which I ultimately got from Joshua Meyrowitz in his book No Sense of Place) and what this might mean in terms of identity negotiation. The post starts by discussing the often dreaded reality of employers using Google as well as social networking sites to gain information about new hires. With rare exception, it seems this side of the issue is what is brought up the most in conversations about internet privacy and information access. danah boyd wrote a blog post a while ago touching on this stuff. She recommended creating a virtual identity and protecting it. I thought this was very good advice and I immediately created a virtual identity of my own, a place where I could post everything “me”; my accomplishments, my contact information, my blog, etc. Anything I felt was relevant to my professional life. I figured this was a much better approach than just sitting back and letting my old net behavior pop up in search engines for everyone to see (please, don’t go looking! 
). Not to mention, it’s much more convenient just to send people to my web page if they need that “me” stuff.
Anyways, I was glad to see the post over at Swift Kick mention this with regard to employers. The following is actually from a post that Swift Kick comments on:
When you have some applicants lined up for a teaching vacancy, do you “Google” them? Seems a pretty large majority say that yes, they do take some time to see what a standard Google search might pull up about a potential hire. And some even admit to doing a cursory MySpace search to see what comes up. In most cases, they say that the intent is primarily to find out if there is anything negative that surfaces. Almost all of them admit, however, that finding positive things about their applicants, as in portfolios or collaborations or even social sites, does or could make a positive difference in the process.
Swift Kick follows up with
The main point of our training, The Secrets Behind Facebook and Myspace, is to use the megaphone of technology to promote your good qualities so you leave positive footprints for people who want to find out about you.
That’s awesome. The megaphone metaphor is perfect. If we teach people the ins and outs of their digital identiti(es) so they know how to better manage them, we can create an image of the Web characterized by conscious self promotion rather than privacy intrusion.
The post goes on to discuss how this sort of sensibility should be worked into school curricula. Presently, we are in a technological situation where many more people know much more about many more people. Whereas before identity was in large part dependent on the control of information access; who has access versus who doesn’t. Today such access is granted to many more people. This calls for us to rethink our conception of identity, and in this case digital identity. I would love to see these sorts of issues being discussed in the classroom!
