identity - 6

I am part of many online communities, all of which I have a specific identity with. I have an online identity with my bank, with my Facebook, with my AOL instant messenger, with eBay, with BlogSpot, and countless others. I think these are the identities that most people are apart of. The cool thing about all these is that I don’t have to have a username that bears my real name. I cannot even begin to remember all the AIM screenames I had. I remember throughout my earlier years in middle and high school I would have a new screename every two weeks. Eventually I got tired of updating my 4657846578 buddies that I had a new screename and got tired of remembering which screename I used for this site or that site. Finally I stuck with one that I use for every single identity. I have the same password for every single website and the same username/account email address.

The online identity that gives away the most about me is, take a lucky guess…Facebook. Everyone has a Facebook account. Facebook is probably one of the biggest social networks online in the present day. It is a combination of blogging, posting comments, posting pictures, posting information into a public domain. The difference is you can choose what you want to make public or private. If you want only your friends to be able to see your pictures but you want your information to be public, you can do that. Facebook is a combination of IRC, blogs, forums, shopping, and to some extent an email address (inbox and outbox).
This chosen identity of mine establishes a reputation and allows me to contact people in several ways. If you look on my Facebook account, you will learn a lot about me (that is if you friend request me cause my profile is on private). You will find out my cell phone, my apartment number at Sweet Home, my birthday, my screename, etc… Some people like to keep that stuff private but I think its more for girls cause honestly, I don’t care if people know my cell phone or know where I live (no offense to the ladies, but its different for guys and girls to post addresses and private info). Facebook also now recently set up a live chat program. You can now Facebook chat with people who are logged on Facebook, another way to interact. If you read my information and stuff you will get the vibe that I like to go out and party a lot. If people are interested in partying and going out and see my pictures and get a good vibe from them, then they can further initiate a friendship with me. If my reputation is despicable in their eyes, then they can either delete me or just be mutual acquaintance.

I have read other blogs in which people talked about how people took their pictures and created a whole new fake account on some kind of website. I cannot say this has happened to me. This is one way someone can steal your identity. Applications like Facebook can also allow, in the most extreme case, a predator or stalker to take pictures and create a fake account and then find people and deceive them. My Facebook identity was hijacked once by my roommates. A less severe case of someone actually creating a fake account, but one time my roommates jumped on my account and changed my name to “Patty O’Ferncher”. They set my pictures to private and added one picture of a random person they found and set that to public. They changed my information and everything to make me look like some creepy old guy. Sure it was funny to me; I mean, it was a harmless prank that is easily fixable. But over the course of fixing it (as names do not change back immediately), I must have received at least 4 inbox messages from people saying “who the hell is this”. No one commented my page anymore and when I commented people not knowing my pictures were private, I would receive threatening or “stfu” comments back. Eventually everything got fixed, but the fact that my friends created a fake identity for me in a matter of minutes was quite scary, considering other people can do it too.

Judath Donath stated in her opening paragraph, “The virtual world is different. It is composed of information rather than matter. Information spreads and diffuses; there is no law of the conservation of information… One can have, some claim, as many electronic personas as one has time and energy to create.” She brings up valid points when it comes to identity. Applications like Facebook, AIM, and Myspace are programs that allow information to be spread to everyone. My opinion of privacy and identity online is, “if its online, someone can find it.” No matter how private your Facebook page is, or how secure your bank accounts are, people who are smart enough can get access to it. We risk our identities everyday by creating a Facebook account or paying your bills online through your online banking account. Identities are a valuable part of our lives, and the fact that our entire lives can be brought up through a possible google search, or someone can access our cookies and see where we have been, is quite scary in my opinion.