When I began my search for “Digital
Puppet” I started simply by typing my first and last names into Google and White
Pages to see what those Network sites would produce. Not much showed up in
Google or the White Page with simply my first and last name, so I dug a little
bit deeper. I entered my city and zip code along with my name, but still I yielded
no results. A trip to the images portion of Google showed some rather old and
previously artistic photos from my early teen years (which I still cringe at,
ick), but nothing that was representative or even brought up who I am online. I
attribute not finding a lot about myself to the fact that I’m not yet 18, which
would explain why I’m not on the White Pages or many other online mediums that
look up adults across America.
After going through Google for a
few pages, I found one of the older usernames I used when I was about 13, so I clicked
on the link. What caught my attention was the fact that this site had the first
“Ciara Bridges” in Chicago, IL that I had seen so far in my trek to find myself
online. The site is named peekyou and it apparently showed all of my email
addresses and all the sites I was on with this username. However, most of the
information was bogus seeing as it listed emails for servers I had never used
and accounts I had never signed up for. I continued my search by trying to
narrow the search down by adding my middle name into the mix. This yielded even
less than before, so I added the city I lived in, which was Chicago. This is
where I hit the gold mine. All my previous activities came up on the front page
of Google, along with my beRecruited page for rowing and my group poetry which
had been recorded by a radio station. My old Youtube and twitter also appeared
from the previous search, but nothing extremely modern was found.
What I found personally from this
exercise is that it really depends on the person to see how much they will find
on the internet. While many of my peers found quite a lot on themselves, I found
next to nothing because of the commonality of my name. My first name I share
with the famous singer “Ciara”, my middle name is “Chanel” shared with the
perfume and clothing/accessory line, and my last name “Bridges” is shared with
a famous black girl from the times of school integration. None of my names are
inherently unique, but combined, they produce a strange concoction of results
which only catch snippets of who I am, or was, in a developing state. I think
if I was to enter in some of my online usernames, much more information about my
current self would be found online. What I take from this search is that what
you can find on a person is conditional to how much they put on the web under
what name or alias, and if that information is recent. If someone Googled me unbeknownst
to me, they would find random information which doesn't represent me currently
as a person, and that is kind of terrifying for me to think of.
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