I Googled myself yesterday. This is not unusual; I “Google” myself with regularity, seeing what kind of digital footprint I’m leaving behind. What I see about myself changes often enough, depending on where I’m Googling myself from, whether I’m logged in to one of my many Google accounts or whether I’m in “incognito” mode, or whether I’ve published anything new on a website that might yield significant Web traffic. I’ve been writing, reading, teaching, and learning in higher education long enough to find a pretty consistent portrait of myself, but I know that part of my constant checking is a form of anxiety: am I still in control of this digital presence? Am I still the one (mostly) crafting the narrative about myself or are algorithms increasingly doing the work for me?
I’ve been hyper-aware of my digital footprint after co-teaching a class on building digital presence online for undergraduate students. The class invites students to think for ten weeks about how they want to build their own personal websites and how they want to reflect their values and identities in an online space. It’s a class that requires throwing yourself into constant existential tailspin: who am I? What do I value? How do I represent what I value? What evidence do I have of what I value?
Beyond these already challenging questions, students then inevitably have to ask the practical questions: to what extent do I want to showcase and share these values? How public do I want these values to be? Which values can I share safely? In an environment where students are increasingly aware of companies surveilling their social networks and mining their every online (and even offline) interaction for marketing data, we all have to make careful, informed choices about what we construct for ourselves.
Sometimes I wonder how much the development of this agency, how much of the careful thinking and construction of digital identity, is a moment of false control or comfort. We have some control over what our digital footprints, but not complete control.
A central tension of building online presence – both for me and my students – is this: how do I become agential in my acts of building digital composing in an environment where my agency feels increasingly out of my grasp?
I ask this question in a backdrop of stories about Turnitin, a plagiarism detection company purchased for several billion dollars by a major media conglomerate, a purchase clearly made to access hundreds of thousands of pieces of data from unwitting students. This kind of news, and the constant surveillance state we’re in, makes me wonder: to what extent is my offering a class about building digital presence just inviting students into a surveillance economy? To what extent am I complicit in the problem?
One response I’ve offered for myself is that the class gives students an opportunity to gauge the extent of their participation online. By inviting students to build their own personal or professional websites, students make choices that are part and parcel of a whole ecosystem of choices that students make online every day. We ask students to have conversations around building and crafting public personae online and, in so doing, confront questions head-on and bring debates about online presence to light. The outcome of these conversations is ultimately one of empowerment: with greater knowledge of digital ecosystems, students can understand which choices about their digital presence they have and which they don’t have.
In the cases where students feel like they don’t have a choice about what’s displayed about them, they react and then get to make a subsequent choice about how to respond to that reaction. It could be protest. It could be resignation. It could be action. As an educator, my goal is to help students see what kinds of responses are available to them and to let them decide which responses to take from there.
Our curriculum aims to help students understand, in the same token, the realities of privacy online alongside search engine optimization practices, two units that may seem at odds, but can thematically be justified insofar as both topics engage centrally in visibility. How much do you want to be visible? To what extent are you already visible? Do you want to make yourself more visible or less? And to whom?
What digital representation really means is always changing. Inevitably, the ways that we have conversations around digital presence will have to change too. But I hope that for the moment, just naming what exists now in the environments that we currently know will support and lift up those who want to understand what their own identities can look like in an online space.