Have you ever applied for a job? Do you know that a growing number of employers are performing online searches of prospective candidates? Do you know what is available online about yourself?
This simple activity will help you consider what you share online and why you choose to share it. It is not necessarily wrong to share your life online, but it is certainly unwise to do so without considering the implications of your choices.
Before you begin, you should log out of all of your social media accounts as you will find different results if you are logged in. The point of this exercise is to learn what other people can find about you on the web.
1. Your task is simply to perform an online search based on your name. We recommend that you use multiple different search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc).
2. Once you have performed and jotted some notes on a few searches, create a new post on your blog and write a short, third-person biography of yourself based only on what you could find in your searches. Make sure that you include pictures, videos, or other media that you might find.
3. Please read [Digital Identities: Six Key Selves of Networked Publics](http://theory.cribchronicles.com/2012/05/06/digital-identities-six-key-selves/) by Bonnie Stewart and incorporate some of the following questions into your post.
* What did you find?
* a negative portrayal of an infamous person with your name?
* vaguely (or worse) embarrassing pictures that your ‘friends’ posted on FB?
* traces of your work on the first search page?
* a fair and cultivated representation of who you are and what you believe?
* Do you recognize any of Bonnie’s proposed ‘selves’ in your own online presence?
* Do you ever self-censor online? If so, which sites?
* Have you ever actively removed content because of concerns about how it relected on your digitial identity? Why?
4. Read [two posts by Kris Shaffer](https://pushpullfork.com/tag/digital-minimalism/) /(you don’t need to read the technical bits about how Kris deleted his tweets unless you want to./) and, include an evaluation of Kris’s recommendations based on your own experience on the web.
##### Categories for this post:
* TWU Online
* Digital Literacy
* Finding U