23 Research Things - Thing 3

When I teach academics about managing their online profiles it's with the notion of using social media to share research and to ensure that their work is associated with them, not someone else with a similar name. For me, the need feels less imperative because concerns of authorship aren't particularly high priority. However, doing the exercises from Thing 3 has reinforced that even if you teach something regularly, you can still improve your own practices.

I'm unconcerned that, in addition to my own online presence, a search for my name delivers a clinician, a blogger and a bassist. Actually, Googling myself is a fairly uneventful experience. Most of my public content is pretty generic and work-related since I have made efforts in the last few years to adjust my privacy settings, be a little more mindful about what I post and break away from the fear of missing out that has at times had me compulsively refreshing pages in case a new post turned up in the last 60 seconds.

My Visitors and Residents exercise

The biggest surprise for me was YouTube, which I didn't even consider as an online space over which I had ownership, hence why I forgot to put it on my V & R map. I consume content on YouTube frequently and have an account there, but what surprised me was that anyone could see my playlists and favourites. While there's nothing dodgy on there (apart from revealing my very random taste in music), I saved videos to playlists for myself, not for public consumption. I have gone through and changed all of that content to private now. Having checked my email accounts with haveibeenpwned, I am most concerned about my Tumblr accounts and will make sure I do my routine password change sooner rather than later.

Looking at my V & R map I can see that my online priorities are shifting from personal to professional: my map a few years ago would have been weighted much more firmly toward the upper right hand quadrant. Part of this shift relates to developing a workflow of "Personal on paper, collaborate on the cloud". But there is still a large degree of bleed-through between professional and personal. Unlike Librarian Errant, I put my name to my online identity, both personal and professional, and rely on privacy settings to ensure I am only allowing certain people into aspects of my personal life. Certainly this allows people to find my content in the professional context, but I do wonder how much I edit myself because I've put my name to things.

Ultimately I don't think there is one right solution. As the Visitors and Residents exercise demonstrates, public vs. private is relative; other people would cringe at the thought of posting things that I consider completely benign to share online. The main thing is to consider security concerns, and, as I teach my academics, that requires setting aside a little bit of time every now and then to figure out what other people find when they Google you.