Case Story: Me according to Google

Summary	25 Years of Virtual Identity
Group / workshop	Digital Identities	Status	seed
Project details...

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

Working in university IT service management since 1984, my virtual identity has evolved (by fairly random mutation) as my role and responsibilities have changed.

Task

What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

Inspired by Andy Powell's model answer at http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2008/11/definedigital-identity.html, I started trying to trace the origins of my own digital identity.

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

The first internet-connected systems that I needed to identify myself on were the University of Oxford's ICL mainframe and VAX minicomputers from around 1984 onwards. Using their email utilities, I subscribed to various LISTSERV mailing lists that related to my job at its Computing Teaching Centre at that time, teaching computing to novices, especially scholars in the humanities. These lists were often broken out into local USENET NEWS groups. Google has duly turned up messages CTCMIKER@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK posted in 1989, eg http://www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist/Archives/Virginia/v03/0480.html . It's especially poignant to read this today as the battery in my home laptop failed over the vacation and last night we suffered a power cut whilst using the machine. Reinstalling XP proceeds …

In 1992 I moved to a new employer and my online identity changed fundamentally - my email address, my email domain, my role, my areas of professional interest, my physical location - all new. All I kept was my real name - well, that's all my friends and family needed to know - it's all that was real to them. Professionally, I WAS someone different. It's quite a distinctive name, I thought, until I looked for myself on Facebook recently and it came up with almost 200 of me. It seems Homer Simpson's been trying to find me since 1992 - http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GzrO1daZQ1E

Once again, my internet identity was bound up with email messages, often via LISTSERVs and USENET NEWS, such as http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/pine-info.1994.11  from November 1994 as suqroch@reading.ac.uk tried to establish usable IMAP email at the University of Reading http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/pine-info.1994.11 . According to Google, the same messages remain mirrored in Polish and Danish archives.

Of course the web was by then establishing itself (once it had overtaken Gopher ...) and it was about this time that my identity split - my university offered a dialup facility for work access, but ISP's began to offer free dialup accounts and email facilities - and I'm still with Tesco.net for general home emails.

A more subtle split occurred soon after; websites offering discussion boards allowed users to choose a handle that was unrelated to their email address, limiting address harvesting for spammers and offering the opportunity for anonymity, to separate real from virtual identities. At the time I made the decision to use variations of my real name and have persisted with that choice, although I'm beginning to feel somewhat uneasy about that now.

An investment oriented website, www.fool.co.uk, was one of several I joined in 2000, and during the share buying euphoria of the new century actively participated in several of its dicussion boards. Perhaps because of the turning of the tide, (but probably because I'm busier) I now tend to lurk most of the time. I restore old railway models as a hobby to raise money for charity - eBay is the perfect platform for this and I have traded under my own name since 2001 without problem.

More recently, in collaboration with other UK HE IT directors and senior staff, I have been using Facebook and other freely available Web2.0 resources like del.icio.us and Slide Share as platforms for professional online contact and collaboration for a couple of years now. The penetration of Facebook into student populations is impressive and Reading's student union have encouraged membership. As d.m.roch@reading.ac.uk I am both emailable and contactable through Facebook (though I never have been contacted by a student this way).

Results

What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

Reflecting on this identity trail, there's potential for some of my story to be aggregated, perhaps maliciously, but it would be far easier to harvest what's current. As well as Facebook, I belong to the LinkedIn website, essentially a CV bank, and between the two, other websites mentioned above and of course Google, I think it would be feasible to collect enough identity information to blag oneself off as me.

Lessons Learned

What did you learn from the experience?

Licensing

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