Blog Post #7

My Digital Tattoo

Image source: https://jaysschoolportfolio.weebly.com/digital-tattoo.html

When I saw what this week's assignment was about, the word "tattoo" resonated with me as I have a bunch of tattoos and most of them are all cover ups of previous tattoos that I foolishly got when I was younger. I even have a tattoo that is a cover up of a cover up. When I think about how permanent a tattoo is, it has me compare it to how permanent our online presence can be. I, personally, have been in the middle of drama on social media and where I would post things that I look back on now, thanks to things like Facebook memories, and I absolutely CRINGE.

I try my best to relay this to my students, especially with me working in middle school this year. Most teenagers do not think about how what they post can stick with them forever, even if erased or deleted, thanks to screenshots. When we think about who is responsible for making sure students nowadays are well informed about how serious social media, chatting, commenting can get, I think it starts with the parents but thereafter it goes to the children's teachers. This topic has been hot in recent SEL conversations in homeroom because there has been NUMEROUS issues with Snapchat and Google chatting involving students and inappropriate content. So as I went into this digging into online self-I think we may need more conversations about this, perhaps at even younger years.

Where to start?

I rarely have met people with my first name but definitely not with both my first and last name, as neither of them are common. I began my search on Google where 12,100 results popped up in .39 seconds. I was involved in a wrongful termination suit against Whole Foods in 2013-14 so I knew that there would be a lot of results on that. I have not done a deep dive into how many articles, blogs, photos there are from that time in my life where I was STRUGGLING. Doing this search brought up some feelings that I forgot I had, as I have not felt them in a while.  I also found my great grandfather's obituary, which also brought up some sad feelings. Now, the most crazy thing I found in this search was a whole paper written on Whole Foods attendance policy using math algorithms! I was mentioned in the article because of the stance I took as a single mother. Here is that link, in case anyone is interested.

Image from personal screenshot 

The next site I dove into, which I never heard of, was Peekyou. I saw things that I did not know were even legal to online, like who I am related to, the car I used to drive and if I have children. It also showed my old MySpace handle, which really took me back to my teenage years.  I looked up Radaris and this site showed my previous address from like 12 years ago, had my age wrong, phone number wrong, related people wrong so most of it was pretty off. I was not mad at the fact that they had the information wrong.

Image from personal screenshot from Radaris

My Thoughts

I knew going into this that there would be lots of results when I Googled myself. I am ok with that but what gives me the heebie jeebies is that there are sites that have such personal information on it like who I am related to or the previous cars that I have owned. I noticed as well that on many of these sites, my mother is linked to me very often. The sites sometimes spell her name as "Rebecca" instead of "Rabecca" but I wondered why she is always linked to me and not anyone else in my family. I recently did a family tree site, Ancenstry.com, and my mother and great grandfather are always on the forefront of that site so perhaps that has something to do with it. I know with social media, it can become an endless hole of memories and your past. It can be invigorating to see what you were like and how you have changed, but it can also be a dreadful past for some that never leaves because it is literally a tattoo that unlike my cover ups, cannot be covered up.