Diving in for Some Digital Ink

The expansion of technology and the internet, and the impact they can have on our personal and professional lives is ever-growing. The fact that we now lead digital lives holds a ton of weight, to the point where our digital life can become inseparable from our real life. We all have different ways in which we have ‘led’ our digital life, with varying degrees of sharing and cohesion with our ‘real’ lives. I can say personally that I am one who has never been a big ‘sharer’ on social media, usually much more of a viewer than using social media to create any sort of following for myself. With that, I would also say that my online ‘persona’ has not exactly gelled with who I am as a person. I would say this started when I was younger, out of a hope to only put the best of myself online for others to see, which I now realize did not come off as very authentic, because obviously this type of presence does not mirror a real life (or mine, at least-no judgments passed on anyone else!). Then, as time has gone on, my lack of interest in sharing too many personal details has kept my online life from being anything remotely close to as established as my real life. And I will be honest, part of that has come from a growing awareness of the fact that anything about us that makes it onto the internet is never truly erasable, that things we may decide we don’t want to be permanent ten years after we share them will still remain. In this vein, the fact that we can choose what we share online (to an extent), and that what we share is so much more lasting than we might realize, our lives online can be seen as more than what is typically thought of as a ‘digital footprint’, and more as a ‘digital tattoo’.

Personal Data Mine

As part of my graduate work, I was asked to conduct a data mine on myself, as a way to better understand just how much about myself could be found online. I thought this would be an interesting endeavor, specifically for the reasons I talked about above; I wondered just how much could be found, when a very limited amount of it would have been purposefully shared. Some of the resources I used to conduct my self data mine included Google, Checkpeople, truthfinder, fastpeoplesearch, instantcheckmate, and Intelius.

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On Google, I was able to find my own LinkedIn page, my old YouTube account (from a past teaching position), and then my wife and I’s wedding website; I thought this was interesting because this (Google) would likely be the most commonly-found piece of my digital tattoo, and it didn’t really bring up a whole lot (a couple of other Adam Blazeks in the world appeared more than I did, so if anything I could see this causing some confusion about which of us is which). 

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Once I began to dig deeper with those services specifically meant to find background information, I found the information to be somewhat hit-or-miss. Most websites got my age correct (hooray…), and the city where I live, but about half listed me at an old address, or at my parents’ address in a completely different town. I was able to find my current address, and my home information (when my wife and I bought it, purchase, taxes, etc.). Some of the other information that seemed to get mixed up was the ‘Adam might know…’ section; a couple of sites correctly listed my wife, and one even had her parents listed as well. Most sites listed my parents and brother as people I know, and that same one again listed my aunts and uncles as well-this was the only time where I had a sense of a site really knowing more than I felt ‘it should’. At the same time, multiple sites incorrectly listed people who had the same last name as me, but I had no idea who they were-I wondered if this could be relatives of one of the other Adam Blazeks in the world, and we were again getting confused with one another, especially with it not being a very common name.

Overall, I would say my data mine didn’t bring too much more than I expected; honestly, I’m not sure what else I would have expected to find about me, and now realize that for anyone to want to find out personal information about me, they would really need to go digging for it. However, as I said before, I am not the most active person online, so I could imagine it being a much different story if I were. Plus, it was kind of funny to look back on some of the old videos I had posted from my prior teaching job-I had flashbacks to how exciting it was to figure out how to screencast and post, and then to do a daily livestream during the pandemic.

Do We Teach It?

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Having gone through this experience, I do think it is important for students to be taught these skills, if for no other reason than they are able to understand just how wide a variety of things can be found. Especially with how much more of students’ lives are being shared online, honestly from the moment they are born in a lot of cases, it is important for kids to know just how visible they might already be without even knowing, and how so much of what they will do will just add to that digital tattoo. I do think that most of my students have at least some awareness of the fact that things about them are visible to others online, but I do not feel as though they yet fully grasp the scope of what can be found. They might be able to name some of the potential dangers, for example, of social media, in terms of how it can lead to bullying, but this side of what is shared online is not really something I think kids fully grasp.

If I was a parent, this is something that I would want to make sure I speak to my own kids about, but I think it should also be something that is included in schools, right alongside digital citizenship and responsible use of technology. Just as there is character education focused on skills to help students lead positive and productive lives, the change of students’ lives in general to being so much more digital creates the need for this facet of education as well.