AoIR Abstract

Author(s): Naomi Baron

Title: "You Are What They Post: Third-Party Identity Construction on the Internet "

*** INTRODUCTION The Internet is recognized as a medium that allows individuals to construct identities of their own choosing. Chat rooms, MUDs and MOOs, and Web pages and Blogs enable biological males to morph into online females or teenagers to appear as suave thirty-somethings. Such repackaging of self is hardly novel. The theme of disguise permeates literature; wigs have long camouflaged baldness; and bending the truth to “make a good impression” crosses time and medium. Erving Goffman’s analysis of how people “present” themselves in everyday life was standard fare among social theorists decades before Internet scholars recognized the applicability of Goffmanian constructs to life online. But if computer mediated communication invites individuals to craft virtual identities, the emergence of powerful Internet search engines has introduced a new phenomenon we might call third-party identity construction. Instead of individuals crafting their own public identities, users of the Internet (“third parties”) form conceptions of others on the basis of information gleaned from Web sites on which those individuals’ names appear. As the number of Web pages continues to soar and as search engines become growingly sophisticated, end-users are becoming increasingly dependent upon the Internet not only for gathering “objective” information but also for shaping their opinions regarding unfamiliar domains. University students commonly google their would-be professors before selecting courses for an upcoming semester. Academic professionals often go online to size up job applicants or unknown correspondents from whom they have received unsolicited email. The vetting procedure once entrusted to Who’s Who or journal indices is moving to Web searches. After perusing the first dozen or so hits produced by a major search engine, Web users begin constructing mental profiles of the individuals referenced in those pages. However, outside of the homepages those individuals may have created (or approved) themselves, the contents of Web sites on which their names appear are beyond the individuals’ control. Like our construction of virtual public selves, third-party identity construction is not unique to the Internet. Radio listeners imagine what favorite announcers actually look like. Public figures are plagued (or blessed) by images projected by the media or word of mouth. Third-party identity construction on the Internet is similar to off-line formulations in a number of ways: End-users need to be prepared to receive different information from different sources (e.g., conservative vs. liberal news media; Google vs. Alta Vista); end-users must decide whether to accept information uncritically or with a grain of salt. However, third-party Internet construction seems unique in that first, the end-user is generally working alone (not part of a mass media audience); second, search engines often produce tens of thousands of hits, only the first few of which most end-users pursue; third, the heuristics determining the order in which hits appear vary across search engines, thereby all but guaranteeing discrepancies in the kinds of information (and hence profiles) yielded in the top entries; and fourth, since yields from even the same search engine change over time, the profile emerging on an individual may shift even though the individual’s accomplishments or activities haven’t altered. Finally, if Internet search engines enable end-users to construct identity profiles of others, the same tools can be used by individuals to discover information about themselves that they either had not previously known or had not been aware was known to others. While the former information may prove useful (comparable to hiring a private investigator to gather personal information), discovery of instances of the latter can lead to concerns that the Internet is becoming a Panopticon, severely compromising privacy. EMPIRICAL STUDY To understand how third-party identity construction on the Internet works in practice, an empirical study will be undertaken analyzing the results of multiple searches on the present author’s own name. Using the search engines Google, Yahoo!, Alta Vista, and Lycos, the first 150 hits (from each search engine) will be collected during the months of February and May, 2004, respectively, yielding eight data sets. After removing duplicate hits and hits referring to people with only the same first name or only the same last name, the entries will be categorized by content type (e.g., references to publications, notices of academic lectures, other people sharing the same first and last names). Taking rank order in the search results into consideration, the content categorizations will be used to construct eight identity profiles. These profiles will then be compared across search engines and across time. The personal use of search engines for information about oneself will be studied using data from two sources: the above corpus plus pilot data collected by the author over the past 12 months. The pilot data suggest the following categories of analysis will prove relevant: (1) Doppelgänger: other individuals with the same first and last names as the author (2) Revelations: personally relevant information about which the author was previously unaware (3) Stalkers: email messages from unknown interlocutors referring to forthcoming activities of the author (presumably accessed through a search engine) (4) Space Junk: long-outdated Web pages referencing the author’s past activities (5) Transience: hits from a search at time T1 that no longer appear at time T2 (6) Lost in Translation: citations on Web pages in other languages for which even rough online translations are unavailable FUTURE RESEARCH This study is the first step in an attempt to understand how information and knowledge are created on the Internet. Simple extensions of the present research include (a) looking at third-party identity construction of individuals in non-academic settings and (b) interviewing end-users regarding their perceptions of how they use search engines to create profiles of others as well their perceptions of Internet constructs of their own identities. A more far-reaching enterprise will explore how Web pages and search engine usage are changing the ways members of the educational enterprise understand the nature of research and of the knowledge we assume derives from it.

RETURN TO PROGRAM
AoIR 5.0

	*Author(s):* Naomi Baron
	*Title:* "You Are What They Post: Third-Party Identity Construction on the Internet "

***	INTRODUCTION The Internet is recognized as a medium that allows individuals to construct identities of their own choosing. Chat rooms, MUDs and MOOs, and Web pages and Blogs enable biological males to morph into online females or teenagers to appear as suave thirty-somethings. Such repackaging of self is hardly novel. The theme of disguise permeates literature; wigs have long camouflaged baldness; and bending the truth to “make a good impression” crosses time and medium. Erving Goffman’s analysis of how people “present” themselves in everyday life was standard fare among social theorists decades before Internet scholars recognized the applicability of Goffmanian constructs to life online. But if computer mediated communication invites individuals to craft virtual identities, the emergence of powerful Internet search engines has introduced a new phenomenon we might call third-party identity construction. Instead of individuals crafting their own public identities, users of the Internet (“third parties”) form conceptions of others on the basis of information gleaned from Web sites on which those individuals’ names appear. As the number of Web pages continues to soar and as search engines become growingly sophisticated, end-users are becoming increasingly dependent upon the Internet not only for gathering “objective” information but also for shaping their opinions regarding unfamiliar domains. University students commonly google their would-be professors before selecting courses for an upcoming semester. Academic professionals often go online to size up job applicants or unknown correspondents from whom they have received unsolicited email. The vetting procedure once entrusted to Who’s Who or journal indices is moving to Web searches. After perusing the first dozen or so hits produced by a major search engine, Web users begin constructing mental profiles of the individuals referenced in those pages. However, outside of the homepages those individuals may have created (or approved) themselves, the contents of Web sites on which their names appear are beyond the individuals’ control. Like our construction of virtual public selves, third-party identity construction is not unique to the Internet. Radio listeners imagine what favorite announcers actually look like. Public figures are plagued (or blessed) by images projected by the media or word of mouth. Third-party identity construction on the Internet is similar to off-line formulations in a number of ways: End-users need to be prepared to receive different information from different sources (e.g., conservative vs. liberal news media; Google vs. Alta Vista); end-users must decide whether to accept information uncritically or with a grain of salt. However, third-party Internet construction seems unique in that first, the end-user is generally working alone (not part of a mass media audience); second, search engines often produce tens of thousands of hits, only the first few of which most end-users pursue; third, the heuristics determining the order in which hits appear vary across search engines, thereby all but guaranteeing discrepancies in the kinds of information (and hence profiles) yielded in the top entries; and fourth, since yields from even the same search engine change over time, the profile emerging on an individual may shift even though the individual’s accomplishments or activities haven’t altered. Finally, if Internet search engines enable end-users to construct identity profiles of others, the same tools can be used by individuals to discover information about themselves that they either had not previously known or had not been aware was known to others. While the former information may prove useful (comparable to hiring a private investigator to gather personal information), discovery of instances of the latter can lead to concerns that the Internet is becoming a Panopticon, severely compromising privacy. EMPIRICAL STUDY To understand how third-party identity construction on the Internet works in practice, an empirical study will be undertaken analyzing the results of multiple searches on the present author’s own name. Using the search engines Google, Yahoo!, Alta Vista, and Lycos, the first 150 hits (from each search engine) will be collected during the months of February and May, 2004, respectively, yielding eight data sets. After removing duplicate hits and hits referring to people with only the same first name or only the same last name, the entries will be categorized by content type (e.g., references to publications, notices of academic lectures, other people sharing the same first and last names). Taking rank order in the search results into consideration, the content categorizations will be used to construct eight identity profiles. These profiles will then be compared across search engines and across time. The personal use of search engines for information about oneself will be studied using data from two sources: the above corpus plus pilot data collected by the author over the past 12 months. The pilot data suggest the following categories of analysis will prove relevant: (1) Doppelgänger: other individuals with the same first and last names as the author (2) Revelations: personally relevant information about which the author was previously unaware (3) Stalkers: email messages from unknown interlocutors referring to forthcoming activities of the author (presumably accessed through a search engine) (4) Space Junk: long-outdated Web pages referencing the author’s past activities (5) Transience: hits from a search at time T1 that no longer appear at time T2 (6) Lost in Translation: citations on Web pages in other languages for which even rough online translations are unavailable FUTURE RESEARCH This study is the first step in an attempt to understand how information and knowledge are created on the Internet. Simple extensions of the present research include (a) looking at third-party identity construction of individuals in non-academic settings and (b) interviewing end-users regarding their perceptions of how they use search engines to create profiles of others as well their perceptions of Internet constructs of their own identities. A more far-reaching enterprise will explore how Web pages and search engine usage are changing the ways members of the educational enterprise understand the nature of research and of the knowledge we assume derives from it.