What Your Digital Identity Says About You and How to Change It

On August 14, Thomas Friedman was NPR's Talk of the Nation guest about how writing your own life story is getting more difficult, on August 13, Content Producer Timothy Sexton appealed to fellow content producers not to be blogstitutes, and on August 14, ABC News ran a feature story about digital dirt. What do all three have in common? They reveal how transparent the world has become as a result of the Internet.

As Neal Conan and Thoman Friedman discussed, a resume is no longer the only information a potential employer can, and probably does, have about you. Love him or hate him, Thomas Friedman does have a point about the lack of privacy in an increasingly public world. As Neal Conan said, "the entirety of [our] lives is going to surround [us] like a nimbus of digital facts."

When I Googled myself, I found my Associated Content work, as well as articles for Suite101.com, and information about the births of my children and my marriage, but fortunately nothing negative or overly personal. But I doubt I would include any of this information on a resume. For potential jobs, I can and do submit writing samples of work I think represent my skill. But employers can read my writing about a range of topics on an unfiltered basis by looking on the Internet. The same goes for the blogs of others (I don't have an official blog). The satisfaction of sharing information and opinions also opens us all up to criticism and others forming an opinion about us.

This idea goes to the heart of Timothy Sexton's article: just because you can write it, doesn't mean that you should. As he says in his abstract, "there is a difference between expressing an opinion in order to get paid and getting paid to express an opinion." Once the article is live, you are forever linked to it.

Taking this idea a step further is digital dirt and E-Venge. E-Venge is just another way that people can, do, and will get revenge via the Internet and share their opinions about others, whether the information they put out there is true or not. The proliferation of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and even LinkedIn make this kind of tell-all have even greater wildfire possibilities. As the ABC News story detailed, E-Venge has directly damaging potential in many ways and has spawned lawsuits and entire businesses devoted to helping clean up people's virtual identity.

That assessments of how the Internet affects what people know about you, and why, appeared within days of each other and on three different mediums is telling about the proliferation of Internet information. Mark Twain said, "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything;" wise words in the virtual world of information. And your writings can speak louder about you than your words.