Having grown up in the 90s and early 2000s has played such an interesting role in molding my personality. In my opinion, Millennials are the most fluid of all of the generations. We remember our active childhood, spending hours upon hours playing with our friends outside, yet we can also hang with the best Gen Z technology geniuses. Having grown up alongside the internet, I feel like my generation has experienced so much of it, which is what makes us so technologically proficient. Although there are so many pros to having grown up and experienced the internet in all of its glory, doing so also means that we have been leaving our trace on the internet for decades. With that being said, I have been through countless social media platforms that I have long deactivated and deleted. I imagine that performing a data mine of myself will not include those older social media accounts that have been abandoned and deleted. Let's find out...
My Results...
The first step in my data mining was to Google my full name. The top results showed my LinkedIn account and a very old Pinterest account that I forgot I made once upon a time and never used. The only other relevant posts that appeared upon Google search of my name were my school's staff directory link, statistics from a volleyball league that I used to play in, and some now-digitized school newspapers from when I was in high school. It was actually really cool to see the old school newspapers from my high school days over a decade ago since I forgot that they existed and had no idea they have since been digitized. Looking through them brought upon me a serious wave of nostalgia. Another surprise from the Google search was the sheer amount of posts related to my sister.
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After Google searching my name, I decided to Google Images my name and see what results appeared. The results were pretty similar to that of the standard Google search. Most, if not all of the Google Images results were related to my LinkedIn account. The first two images were profile pictures from my LinkedIn account, and the rest of the images that appeared were related to the posts that I like and/or shared on LinkedIn. I was genuinely surprised to see that the posts that I interact with appear on Google Images when I search my own name. This is so important for individuals, especially young people and students, to understand, because people tend not to realize that the content they are interacting with on the internet can be associated with their names for everybody to see.
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I decided to expand my horizons away from the safety blanket that is Google and decided to plug my name into PeekYou. The results were definitely interesting... PeekYou stated that I am a 23 year old male, which is 5 years younger than I actually am. PeekYou also had both Hotmail and AOL email addresses listed for me, as well as Facebook and MySpace accounts. The information on PeekYou was only slightly dated and inaccurate to say the least. The most accurate piece of information listed about me on PeekYou was the very random statement, "Pepsi is one of his favorite foods". I am assuming this absolutely hilarious and random statement came from a near-ancient Facebook post that I had made once upon a time.
This data mining experience brought me back to my high school days when social media was on the rise, teenagers everywhere were flooding the streets of Facebook, and the adults were yelling at us to be careful about what we post on the internet. It's funny to look back on those days with the knowledge that we have now and realize that the adults were kind of right the entire time. For all the social media posts that I made in my teenage years, thank goodness that my love of Pepsi cola was the only one that stuck around.
As someone who also grew up in the 90's and early 2000's, I think we have a very different relationship with online data than Gen-X or Baby Boomers. I tend to use an online handle when I do anything online so I really did not have much luck during my search, what I did find however that my father who shares the same first and last name and me has all kinds of information out there. None of it was seemed to be anything too bad, address, phone number, age, former occupation stuff like that but I also noticed during my search that the people who showed up tended to skew in the older direction than the younger.
ReplyDeleteHi Justin, I agree that millennial are the most fluid generation. I was also raised in a similar time as you. I had similar sentiment in my blog post remembering when teachers and adults in general would remind us about our online footprint. I always thought they were overreacting but looking back they were definitely right! Thanks for sharing.
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