Imagine internet identity numbers, assigned at birth

One of the interviewees of this piece I wrote for ChinaSMACK and some other sites, freaked out recently because she started job searching and realized that the only thing that came up on Google searches of her was my story. Which hardly paints her in the most admirable of lights. Not that she minded at the time. Different story now that she’s job hunting though.

It reminded me of a video I’d seen recently of 4chan founder Christopher Poole (aka ‘Moot’) who supports multiple online identities rather than everything being tied to our IRL identity:

“Google and Facebook would have you believe that you’re a mirror, but we’re actually more like diamonds,” Poole told the audience. “Look from a different angle, and you see something completely different… Facebook is consolidating identity by making us more simple than we truly are.”

In an effort to help my interviewee who had too rashly agreed to use her real name in the piece, I went around emailing editors asking them to change her name. Unfortunately I don’t know if the internet will be completely scrubbed free, because it’s harder to change the places in which the piece was re-posted or shared on social media networks.

It also had me thinking, a name - though very personal - is one that you actually share with many other people in the world. Imagine if we were all, when born, assigned an internet identity number that was entirely unique. And people could search for you using that number. The results would be completely specific, and probably very detailed, turning up everything you had ever done or been mentioned in online.

Talking of multiple identities, one of my best friend’s dad added me on Facebook recently. Always a bit funny when that happens. My Dad hasn’t even added me - nor I him. Despite the fact that he always comes up in the “suggested friends” panel. We’re clearly facebook-avoiding one another, for reasons that are mutually, and silently, agreed upon.