Identity in a Digital World

In a time so involved with the online world it is crucial to create a positive digital footprint. This means your identity online should be positive and difficult to find any negative aspects of yourself online. Have you ever tried googling your own name? What pops up? Is it mainly positive aspects or negative aspects? When applying for jobs now a days it is very common for employers to google the candidates name, if you have a positive digital identity and footprint you should be safe, however if a negative identity and footprint appears, the employer may not want to hire you. It is not only future employers who may google you, anyone who knows your name can simply put it into google and see what comes up. 

For this blog post we are to cybersleuth one of our fellow classmates. I have chosen to see if I can find any new information about my roommate from last year, Kelsey Deptuck. I started by simply going to google and just searching her name. The first thing that came up was her edusites blog. I checked out her blog there I could get to her as she had an about me page with pictures. She also had different pages for different courses she has taken so far for her degree, so I could see about some of her teaching philosophies and a bit of who she would be as a teacher from some of the posts under these. Nexther Instagram showed up so I went to check that out. There I could see some of her photos, many of them took place outdoors. From there her VSCO was linked in her bio so I followed that to find some more photos. These photos were mainly of her hanging out with friends and going on some fun adventures. I then went back to

Google and saw her Twitter so I followed that. Compared to her other accounts that I checked out, Twitter had little to no personal information or photos of her life. She has more of a professional presence on Twitter where she shares teaching resources. Other things I found on Google near the bottom was a pinterest account, that she worked for the Rosthern summer program, and the Spiritwood curling club facebook page which made sense as she had curling photos on multiple of these social media platforms I looked at. Under Google images I just found more images of things I already learned about.

In conclusion, I did not find any new information about my friend. I would say that Kelsey has a positive digital identity and footprint as I was not able to find any negative aspects through my searching. It was quite easy to learn about Kelsey from just putting her first and last name in Google.

How is your digital identity? Would you go and clean up any of your digital footprint?