Your Digital Double

As more and more activity occurs online, and the greater the detail of data is entered, the more likely a reasonable picture of what a person is like, what activities they engage in, their areas of interest and dislikes, can be reasonably drawn from online information alone. Without ever meeting someone, you have get a sense of personality, buying patterns, voting and political affiliates as well as what they do for work and trade. I refer to it both as a persons Digital Double and also as their Virtual Doppelganger.

The Digital Double is the picture that is created from the information assembled and it is something everybody should be aware of about themselves. This is how more and more people and companies are going to view you, so knowing how complete or incomplete that information is becomes as important as knowing your credit history or maintaining your personal records.

As for the Virtual Doppelganger, according to Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913).

Doppelganger \Dop"pel*g["a]ng`er\, n. [G.]
A spiritual or ghostly double or counterpart; esp., an
apparitional double of a living person; a cowalker.

Or if you prefer a more casual definition with less authority but more fun, try this from the Psychic and Mediums Network. "The Doppelgänger is the German word for a ghostly double of a living person. The word comes from doppel meaning "double" and gänger translated as "goer". The term has, in the vernacular, come to refer to any double of a person, most commonly in reference to a so-called evil twin, or to bilocation. Alternately, the word is used to describe a phenomenon where you catch your own image out of the corner of your eye.

I actually think of the concept of how we appear to others based on Internet and Web accessible information more frequently in the doppelganger sense, because doppelgangers are described as mischievous and troublesome. Online information about ourselves is inherently incomplete, biased and sometimes outright incorrect. Yet as we spend more time in living and working virtually the more we become reliant upon this information.

In this blog I will be revisiting this idea frequently and will include the tag of "Digital Double" to those postings.

How can you start to get a sense of what your digital double looks like. Two easy starting points are to do a vanity search or to visit www.zoominfo.com. I will write more on vanity searches at a later time, but for now, check out data aggregator Zoominfo. Go to the people search and type in your name. See what come up. I come up, but under three different affiliations.

Over time, the more you know what is out there about you, the more you have control over what it says and what it says about you. If you do a search, I would be interested in hearing from you as to what you think about what you have found.