Digital Biographer™

I always fancied myself as a revolutionary… and now ‘The Times’ has made reference to me as the “digital biographer” in an article entitled:

Log on and rediscover the generation gap
Facebook and MySpace are in the vanguard of a social revolution.

The article outlines ‘a vast shift taking place in how a younger generation is defining its social life and privacy‘ and gives a glimpse into the workings on online social networks for those who may find the erms superpoking, wall-posting and hikkuping quite alien.

Although I do appreciate mention in The Times, I had to send them a note to clarify that my prices start from £369, for a profile makeover here at Ecademy - a fact that was perhaps a little more clearly outlined in a BBC interview earlier this month: “Meet the digital biographer“

As a no longer strictly youthful 43, I can imagine that I might want some or all of my youthful scribblings and photographs, so important to my self-image and my peers perhaps 20-25 years ago, to not be accessible to my peers now. Luckily for me (and probably the world at large) there was nowhere to upload that material until I was in my thirties. (I only got a PC in 1985 and email address in 1987)

However, something the article set me thinking about is that perhaps there is a future business model for MySpace, Facebook etcetera in simply allowing people to airbrush their history when they wish to? A “digital eraser” might cost you an ‘administration fee’ perhaps, and a total ‘whitewash’ will involve you visiting several sites, or having an agent act to remove your footprint across different networks. For a more considerable fee, you might pay to have your records sanitised rather than erased, so that you seem like an all round clean living model of perfection to prospective employers / partners / insurance companies / credit agencies?

As a pointer to this trend, there are sites that have aggregated such content and can pinpoint your membership of social networks, and act as ‘reputation lookup’ services such as Rapleaf…

Full article at The Times Online: Log on and rediscover the generation gap

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digital biographer, online identity, social media