I was thinking some years back as the web developed that it’d pretty near be impossible for me to remain anonymous in what many now call cyberspace.
Or could I remain a little wispy like these two angels…
For a start even back then [15 yrs ago or more] it seemed obvious my work would see me using the Internet daily.
I thought of doing my best to “hide” in this virtual world and sometimes I’d “ego surf” [look for mention of my name in search engines such as Google].
No matter what, I’d pop up, and when I became an Authorized Apple Reseller it became impossible to imagine not being found!
At some point I realised I did have some choices. This was my line of reasoning:
There is nothing to stop anyone slandering us on the web, but it would be a lot less effective if we participated in publishing and commenting in social media and on blogs rather than avoiding it.
And this has turned out to be a fairly good strategy in a world that no one edits the content of. Because if our name does pop up in a consistent way in page after page of results, the public should they find derogatory content, are well able to make up their own minds as to the validity of such.
What I have found harder though is the truism that when we publish, it’s like giving birth. We’ve exposed ourselves to a degree by “putting it out there” and while that maybe unsettling enough we may also worry that someone will then criticise us and publish that wholesale as well. The term “putting our head on the chopping block” is often used.
But this seems really to be me putting a negative spin on things. One way or another our egos are involved also.
It may help to consider though that daily more content is published than can be read! If this is true then that does at least leave self affirmation as a motive.
So thinking this through for me it comes down to positive criticism verses negative. So far for me it’s been the former – family love the regular news updates and among my readers I’ve made new friends and consolidated and caught up on older friendships.
On another level as one of my friends recently pointed out to me, I can remain reclusive and private in my day-to-day life, but there maybe more to be gained than lost by publishing in the virtual world.
We don’t necessarily need to wear our hearts on our sleeves, but can carefully craft words and pictures to even change a paradigm.
From a marketing perspective even, “we do train people as to how they treat us!”
We all need protection from the elements, and we can use the means to limit what people can see. Certainly many people dress in black [am an orange fan myself] and wear sunnies so they’re not easily “readable”…
Just recently though while ego surfing I found reference to a guide book I’d edited / published in 1976. About 1500 copies were sold. In 1976 the Internet as we know it today was barely imagined!
It maybe impossible to escape being written about, or tagged in a social media.
- What are our human rights re privacy – our recourse should we wish to have content removed?
- What legacy will remain on countless storage devices after we die?
- When publishing should we feel comfortable quoting a person’s full name, or do what I’ve often done, which is to mention just their first name [knowing how easy it is to type for example; "john smith" + christchurch + sumner" in a search engine - [the quote marks help narrow a search]]?
- Do we have to be emotionally available to publish? If so exactly what does the term “emotionally available” mean?
What are your thoughts on these issues?
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