As found through multiple search engines, Matt Squirell is a Director of Sales for the Reliable Automatic Sprinkler Company of New York and is a father of two children and husband to Kimberlee Squirell who all live at 14756 16A Avenue in Surrey, British Columbia Canada. Matt is active on social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram often utilizing the pseudonym “sultanofsurrey”. Pictures of himself and family are below:
Through my search, I discovered more about myself than I had expected. Although I did not find any connected pictures with friends or family that would make me blush, or find embarrassing, I did find pictures and links to social media sites on Google, Bing and Yahoo alongside a thorough synopsis of my career stats, both past and present with my current employer found on the those browsers’ first pages . I suppose since my last name resonates closely in both spelling and pronunciation to that of a furry rodent, many pictures of that species fortunately drowns out any other pictures of myself.
I believe that what I found was indeed a fair representation of who I am, at least from a professional perspective. Personally, as a matter of normal practice, I have always refrained from many tweets or posts reflecting my thoughts or desires publicly on anything that could be maligned or mis-interpreted. I still do not trust where all this is going; therefore, with the exception of maintaining a professional profile, I intend to continue the tradition of self-censorship when actively or passively working on the web.
As it relates to Bonnie Stewart’s (2015), Digital Identities, I would say that I often “test” the waters from a version of participatory self identity. I prefer to consume my social media feeds for business and professional gain, but am also interested in giving back fresh and unique, albeit measured, perspectives usually after some long introspection. The prompt also queries whether I would have, or already have removed content because of concerns with my digital identity and I would have to say after this exercise, most certainly I would. In fact, during this post I navigated to Twitter’s privacy settings to pursue removal of certain aspects in my home page (family pictures), only to realize that I would have to deactivate the account, then petition Google to remove the URL associated with the user (me).
I really enjoyed Kris Shaffer’s recommendations to the point where I returned to my Twitter page and removed the picture of my family and updated my profile picture. Again, I can see the pitfalls and perils as it relates to consistent management of your digital identity and presence on the web; therefore, I suppose for now, excluding what I share with my MA cohort, I’ll be happy being the poster boy for self-censorship.
Matt