Are Our Online Identities Becoming Bigger than Our Real Life Identities?

May 21, 2007 | Media Trends

It struck me last night that our online identities are becoming bigger and larger than our real life identities because others are tagging us. I was cruising Technorati to find all the social media/videos/blogs on Tessa, The Bachelor contestant (she’s friends with one of our employees ;-) In one episode her best friend was literally on for no more than 2 minutes of airtime and hundreds of people from her high school jumped on the blogs etc to write about what a Witch she was. One post said (paraphrasing) “I’m so happy to know that when her kids grow up they’ll search her name and read all these posts about how horrible their mother is.” (!) Her online identity in that moment took over her real world ID!

This is happening to everyone though, even me. I was at the MOO party last week and a business acquaintance snapped a butt ugly pic of me and voila ““ there it was on Flickr the next day tagged donnasokolsky. All I could think was “there are ugly pictures of me online, and I have no control over this. They are there forever.” The accumulation of everything about us on sites like Technorati ( a Spark client) is happening because tagging is superseding search as sites adapt to the changes on the Internet. Google is also revamping similarly.

Dave Sifry is talking about how the internet is evolving in a way that unanimous categories are popping up. No matter what country, age or lifestyle, we all seem to be tagging objects the same exact way ““ even though there are more than 250MM tagged items on the Internet now! I think this signifies something bigger is happening—pull up a lawn chair and pop some popcorn— it’s going to be fascinating to watch.

Donna

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