Sunday, April 29, 2007

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.

9 comments:

Tony Quicho said...

My blog says just enough about me... XD but i have found a lot about kayla and it seems like she was uncomfortable... LOL

Andrew Park said...

hmm... I never thought about people coming in to my blog and read my stuffs and figure out stuffs that represents my characteristics. During the assignment, what Jenalyn told me was pretty accurate. LoL.. I don't really have much things to hide from other people..so...I'm not that scared about people knowing about me.. but when it get to bugging me with spams and ads... please...:p

♥ Kayla [[C.]] Hinrichsen♥ said...

After looking over my classmates blog and mine I found that they can make many accurate assumptions about me by what I have bloged about on my blogspot. I belive the way people write, what colors they use ,and what they write about can create many assumptions about them.

danhoy said...

well what my partner said about me from my blog wasn't too surprising. the assumptions made about me were fairly accurate but i wasn't too surprised about it.

Netta said...

Well I think that my doppelganger was sorta, kinda, maybe accurate. Whenever I have to blog about something I try to interject my own personality in it so that's kind of a hint. In the exercise we did I learned that I can come across as not serious (true) and that I'm laidback (sometimes). I put icon's and quotes on, so that attention to detail could be interpreted as whatever. I talk about movies and put my music on the blog so that shows that I like movies (love movies!) and music (LOVE MUSIC). So yeah, I think its pretty accurate... So far.

Ms. Jenalyn said...

I partnered up with a partner and I told him to read my blogs and he could tell a lot about me when reading this. When I write something about me, it shows my personality when I write my blogs, and my whole entire page shows me. I think it is cool how people can tell my personality just by reading my blogs.

Well Andrew's assumptions of me were most likely true. Plus you helped him give information out. He found out a lot of information on me while reading my blogs, because I have very outgoing in my blogs, especially when I said "I was the coolest person you will ever meet and Andrew figured out that I lived in Federal Way, and very I went to TJ.

Trypsta said...

My blog does show a pretty accurate picture of me. It shows how im laid back, into video games and music. At the same time it also shows my humorous side because of the pants comment i made in the begining of the quarter. Although many people may not take that as a joke and think im serious about it. Most likely this will be the old peopel that read it..

Lukas Grove said...

Well, my digital double probably is gaining more of an identity each day. With blog posting, forum posting, myspace, and any other online activity, you're basically rounding out your character online that people anywhere can see. Not many people keep track of what they put online about them selfs, but I would suspect the average person has more personal information about them selfs online than the average bank would require for you to start an account. (Personal information in the sense of things about you besides your hard facts like SS number and all, well, hopefully your SS number isn't public)

kyle jackson said...

From what I have seen and heard the amount that a person can tell about you personaly is on how much you post on your blog. If you post to little than the readers have a narrow sight that they can use to judge what kind of person you are from. Though if you post often, your readers have more information for them to make their assumptions from. While I do not have a personal care about this because once this class is over I will be deleting this blog. But for those who have other accounts on line or plan on keeping this blog can have peopel make judgements from.

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