Are our digital footprints out of our hands?
I’ve been wrestling with the idea of the “digital footprint.” A mere fifteen years ago, the careers of public figures lived and died by the cultural arbiters of our society: the media distributors. If a politician acted in a reprehensible manner, or an artist released a lack-luster single, the consequences were determined by the distribution networks that were able to reach the largest audience. Today, distribution has become a commodity (hence my ability to write and publish this post), and so the consequences of those actions encounter a less straightforward path. In the age of information, the way in which we access knowledge is entirely contingent on the products that are built to distribute it.
Let’s tackle an easy example — the current President of the United States. A quick Google search will reveal the following top hits (of 359 million total results):
Google has designed their search algorithm to surface information that’s most relevant to the user; most people searching for Trump, aren’t hoping to encounter his biography, they’re looking to catch up on the latest news — so by surfacing the most recent stories (between 3 minutes and 23 hours old), Google can ensure the best user experience to keep users coming back. So, if recency is the metric that’s most valued by Google’s search results, how does that impact our digital footprint and our overall reputation? Does our cultural consciousness, largely informed by phone alerts & notifications, recent search results, and posts in our social feeds, suffer from a sort of short-term memory loss based on the fact that we’re so flooded with information? Tech products are now the gatekeepers of information, and thereby the gatekeepers of our (latest) reputation.
On Friday’s Reputation Management class we spoke at length about cost and benefit of maintaining an online presence, which is something I think a lot about, on both a personal and professional level. For example, today Facebook reminded me that it has been two years since I went to Hawaii with my ex-boyfriend. Thanks for surfacing that cherished memory, Facebook!
Fortunately, that memory is actually a happy one — but its an uncomfortable reminder as I start to develop a new relationship in 2017. Prior to social media, though, we still had reminders of the people we grew out of being — whether those were in journals or photographs, public or private. The difference today is that the barrier to publishing any of those things publicly is just a click of a button — and the way in which products might change in the future to remind us of the people we’ve been in the past isn’t something we can control — Facebook Memories & Google Search are just two examples of how our digital footprints are out of our hands.
