RoelAfter Brian Holmes it's time for some social entrepeneurs, starting with a famous name in this business: Konstantin Guericke. Yesterday we talked about reclaiming souvereignity, considering the exposure to surveilled ánd observed area's, questioning if we can still consider our identity as our own. Hence today we will push it more towards publicity, we can use that to control our own identity, or can we?
Konstantin Guericke
While working at LinkedIn, you learn methods, techniques, and manners to control your online identity. Konstantin is doing a kind of corporate talk on LinkedIn and Jaxtr, but in the end I could agree with his message. His experience at LinkedIn was a nice addition to the central theme of this symposium today, and his view on controlling not only publicity but also communications was rather interesting. We are all worried about our privacy on the web, and our personal data flying around on numerous distinct webservers; but what if we can use this in a good way? Why not try to control by yourself what is wandering around on that vast internet? Or even better, we can assure that particular information is displayed more prominently than others. Off course you already noticed that a story on LinkedIn is emerging here, but it actually works; hear me out.
Self-publishing AND being in control of personal information generates opportunities. Actually, you might be able to improve your credibillity at one point. Using (professional) social networks to create an online image of your identity is a good way to do this. This works, mainly thanks to Googles' indexing algorithm. Domains that are being linked often or generate a lot of traffic, appear high in search results. Thus, when you Google for example on Konstantin Guericke, the first result is his LinkedIn profile. When looking at nowadays trends, we can see that these social networks are being used by a new kind of searchengines, who search not just webcontent, but use especially social networks to search in what they call 'The deep web' for information based on personal profiles and member directories, and for example scientific publications.
Considering your online identity, when working in this business, people are expecting to find you. They will ask questions when they can't. Where did you work? Who acknowledges you as a respectable colleague? And why? This is important information for people who want to know more about you, on a professional level. It is only a matter of time, when we are rather using the internet to find information about a person, than using the white- or yellowpages. This is a very near future, now that Facebook decided to open up their profile pages for Google to index. I can imagine, that if I grew up in the USA, my social network would be for the bigger part active on Facebook. In that case, when I meet someone in the pub and I'd like to know more about him or her, I would use Facebook to find out more about this person.
The conclusion is bringing me back to the question I asked during the (actually ridicilous) discussion in the end of the symposium: What about education? It is a really nice idea that we all should think about what we publish on ourselves, or which community we should be part of, but who the heck is going to teach us that? We need to educate the next generation of internet users, on how to handle personal information, controlling an identity online, and maintaining a safe and comforting feeling while using all these interesting (social) webconcepts. Only then, when we are showing each other what to do and what not, we can talk about privacy in a more centralised matter, because untill now, I can only consider this as childsplay.
