As the world becomes increasingly digitized, more and more platforms are becoming available for people of all backgrounds to share themselves with each other. Trips taken are photographed and posted on Instagram, articles are shared and shared again on Facebook, vine compilations and conspiracy theories and celebrity interviews circulate Youtube, streaks are held on Snapchat, Trump and Chrissy Teigen feuds hold down Twitter, professionals connect on LinkedIn, and the list goes on.
But with this plethora of platforms, with every post and share and tweet, we are leaving behind a digital footprint, a margin of ourselves in some crevice of the Internet. Once issued, our thoughts are no longer ours and our personal lives are no longer personal.
So in effort to examine just how extensive digital footprints can be, I investigated my DCI 180: Black Mirrors and Digital Culture professors Mary Abdoney and Elizabeth Teaff.
Let’s start with Mary Abdoney, since her footprint is much larger and relatively easier to track down than Professor Teaff’s.
Disclaimer: some information may be inaccurate. Take with grain of salt.
Personal Life: Mary Michel Abdoney, 43 y/o, went to H.B. Plant High School in Tampa, Florida. A few years after completing her education, she moved to Lexington, VA (112 Myers St) with husband Ned Norland, who grew up in New Jersey and is now a member of the IT staff at W&L. They have a son, Emmett, who attends Woods Creek Montessori where Norland is Vice President of the Board of Directors.
Professional things: Mary Abdoney earned her B.A. in Philosophy, Anthropology and Secondary Education from the University of Florida in 1999. She then attended the University of South Florida from 2000-2001. After moving to Lexington, VA, Abdoney became head librarian at Telford Science Library at Washington and Lee University, and also works as instruction coordinator, science librarian and associate professor. She is also a member of Alpha Xi Delta, Virginia Library Association, Association of College and Research Libraries, and American Library Association.
Other things: She’s into cats. Like, a lot (check out her Flickr). She likes sewing and colorful things. She’s a fan of Blue Phoenix Cafe, wants to witness the downfall of the patriarchy and white feminism. Hates Nazis. Votes, loves carbs (especially chocolate cake), wants to block the sun, watched the eclipse, and made a new Twitter account in May 2018. She’s either an ally or a member of the lgbtq+ community and her pronouns are she/her.
Awesome! Now on to Prof. Elizabeth Teaff.
It seems like Teaff keeps most things private. Her digital footprint is less extensive than most, but here’s what I’ve found:
Elizabeth Anne Teaff, born 1/1/1975, attended Gloversville High School in New York, Fulton Montgomery Community College (1994), State University of New York at Potsdam (1996), Virginia Commonwealth University, and University of South Carolina-Columbia (2006). Her pronouns are she/her, she’s Associate Professor Head of Access Services at Washington and Lee University, and she knows of a William Shumate. She likes cats and flowers and colorful things and funky hair styles. She also has a thing for spiders.
Although I didn’t find as much information about Prof. Teaff as I did Prof. Abdoney, the beginners investigative work I did allowed me to obtain personal information about both of them. I got a sense of their political stances, their hobbies, their family lives and more. Their posting patterns and the platforms they choose to share on help me understand the type of people that they are. In addition, due to the emergence of personalization, the “recommended” on their Youtube accounts, ads on their Facebook, the “suggested” on their Instagram search bar help contribute to creating a bubble around them. The content Prof. Teaff and Abdoney are exposed to on a daily basis is filtered, altered and carefully chosen to accommodate their computed interests, making it so that they are not exposed to ideas not of their own, unless they deliberately search for it. And with this personalization, people are less likely to even consider others’ points of view, allowing for an ignorant and inconsiderate society.
Overall, I personally don’t share my life on social media all too much. I’m barely on Snapchat, I rarely post on my Instagram account, and the Facebook app has automatically deleted on my phone because I haven’t used it in 6 months. But Googling myself, I still found a lot of information I did not expect to find. As I go on using these platforms, I’ll certainly be more conscious of the permanency of the content I put out. One way to tackle this invasiveness is to watch what you post!