The following is an excerpt from an article written by Kelli Marshall, for The Chronicle, originally published January 5, 2015. For the full article click here.

Kelli Marshall is a lecturer at DePaul University and teaches film and television courses in its communications department. She also writes columns on career issues for Vitae, The Chronicle’s career website.

 

 

In 2009, anyone who searched my name on the web would first encounter the opinions of a disgruntled Midwestern undergraduate who lambasted me for being an unfair, unprofessional, and essentially ignorant professor.

Oddly enough, the student was angry because I had begun incorporating Twitter into the classroom. I was among the early advocates of using the social-media site in teaching, especially in large lecture-based courses. While many of the 120 students in my introductory film course embraced the Twitter assignments I devised, a handful revolted, including this particular student. He took to the Internet to express his belief that social media had no place in the college classroom, and any professor who thought otherwise was not only oblivious to Twitter’s intent (It’s for socializing, not learning!), but also graded her students unreasonably. In his diatribe, he called out my name, school affiliation, and the classes I taught.

Because I attended a graduate school focused on technology and digital media (even for those of us in the humanities), I’ve had an Internet presence since 1999. Teaching assistants in my Ph.D. program were required to, at the very least, post their syllabi online. Our advisers also encouraged us to have our own websites (or pages), which we rudimentarily made via software like Microsoft FrontPage (1996) and Netscape Composer (1997). So I’ve been aware of the need to shape one’s digital identity or online persona for quite a while now.

But of course, the Internet changed significantly between when I left graduate school in 1999 and my student’s public critique of me in 2009—see, for example: Google rankings, social media, sitemaps, shifts in search algorithms, robots, crawlers, and search-engine optimization in general. The Internet has changed even from 2009 to today. Suffice it to say, that undergraduate’s tirade is now buried deep in the web. Nowadays, the first item to appear when anyone plugs my name into a search engine is my personal website, followed by my social-media presence, and then direct links to the mainstream publications for which I’ve written.

So how might academics—particularly those without tenure, published books, or established freelance gigs—avoid having their digital identities taken over by the negative or the uncharacteristic?

After all, no one wants to be associated almost exclusively with blogs of disgruntled students, Tumblr and Twitter hashtags like #IHateMyProfessor, Facebook hate groups such as “I No Longer Fear Hell, I Took a Course With Aruna Mitra,” and other potentially contentious sites like Rate My Professors. As an academic or would-be academic, you need to take control of your public persona and then take steps to build and maintain it. With drag-and-drop websites, automatic publishing tools like IFTTT (short for “If this, then that”), and social-media sharing, this task is not necessarily as time-consuming as it seems.

Take control. In a nutshell, if you do not have a clear online presence, you are allowing Google, Yahoo, and Bing to create your identity for you. As a Lifehacker post on this topic once noted: “You want search engine queries to direct to you and your accomplishments, not your virtual doppelgangers.”

An online search for academics without strong digital identities almost always yields two initial results: first, the name of their institution or department, and, second, their webpage on Rate My Professors. While the latter is not inherently bad news for all academics, many will likely cringe at what’s written about them there, whether justified or not.

The best advice: Search your own name, particularly if you’re going on the job market and perhaps also if you’re going up for tenure. See what committees will see when they engage with you digitally.

After that, buy a domain name ending in .com or .net. That purchase will run you about $15 a year, from companies like HostGator, Network Solutions, or Namecheap.…

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Want to learn more? Read the rest of Kelli Marshall’s tips on taking control of your digital identity here.

Article by Laura Sydell, Digital Culture Correspondent for NPR , all tech considered. For the full article, click over to NPR.

 

 

 

In Silicon Valley’s youth-obsessed culture, 40-year-olds get plastic surgery to fit in. But IDEO, the firm that famously developed the first mouse for Apple, has a 90-year-old designer on staff.

Barbara Beskind says her age is an advantage.

“Everybody who ages is going to be their own problem-solver,” she says. And designers are problem-solvers. Beskind speaks while sitting on a couch at the open office space of IDEO in San Francisco. She commutes to the office once a week from a community for older adults where falling is a problem.

“People where I live fall a lot,” she says, adding, “For a friend of mine, I tried to design air bags of graded sizes that would be activated at a lurch of 15 degrees.” She is stumped on how to find the right power source for her air bags.

 

Beskind says she started designing when she was 8 years old — toys, of course.

“Well, in the Depression, if you can’t buy toys, you make ’em, ” she says. Beskind’s first design was for a hobbyhorse. “I was determined I was going to have one, and so I made it with old tires. I learned a lot about gravity, ’cause I fell off so many times.”

When it was time for college, Beskind told her counselor she wanted to be an inventor. That required an engineering degree. In those days, women couldn’t get into those departments. So she studied home economics and later enlisted in the Army and became an occupational therapist.

After 44 years, she retired as a major and then went into private practice. From those years, she has six patents on inflatable devices that help children with balance issues.

Beskind tried to retire again. Two years ago she was watching 60 Minutes and saw David Kelley, the founder of IDEO, talking about how important it was to have a diverse staff on a design team. He emphasized how important it was to bring different perspectives to a project.

Beskind says the interview made her think she wanted to work at IDEO. “Oh, that sounds like that’s for me,” she remembers thinking. “And besides that, I was living in Silicon Valley. What could be better?”

Beskind wrote to the firm and she heard back within days. It turns out that interest in designing products for older adults is growing as baby boomers age.

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Read more about how Beskind is influencing designs to consider older generations. Click here for the full article on NPR’s all tech considered.

Book review by Jenae Cohn, PhD student in the English Department at University of California, Davis. Her research explores the rhetoric of loss in texts interrogating the shift from print to digital culture.

This book review was originally published on hastac.org. Check out their website for more great reviews and job opportunities!

In journalist Andrew Keen’s #digitalvertigo, an anxious meditation on the impacts of the twenty-first century’s “social media revolution,” he describes a tweet he sends to his followers upon seeing the corpse of Jeremy Bentham: “I UPDATE, THEREFORE I AM.” Keen offers this tweet as a critical self-prophecy, a suggestion that status updates control the man more than the man controls the status updates.

It’s easy to slip into this pessimism, this desire to assume that self-expression online necessary reflects narcissism or a desperate desire for socil acceptance. The unprecedented accessibility and ease of creating updates and selfies makes it easy to fear the consequences of such constant engagement in self-tracking and self-expressing.

Jill Walker Rettberg’s latest book, Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs, and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves, measuredly weighs the origins of “selfie” culture, the impacts of sharing data so freely on the Web, and the cultural impulses driving the popular desire to become a “quantified self.” Rettberg does not take a definitive stance on whether selfie-taking, self-quantifying, or engaging in endless public expression is completely valuable or absolutely destructive, and this is to her benefit. What Rettberg’s book offers is a collection of resources on many of the tools and practices that define digital self-fashioning in a contemporary world.

The book is divided into six chapters, the first three of which focus on self-representation and self-portraiture and the last three of which focus on self-quantification and the appeal of discovering the “truth” about one’s self through streams of data gathered by wearable devices and smartphone apps. What binds these six chapters together is their reflection on the appeal behind the ease and accessibility of representing and sharing information about one’s self online. Rettberg takes the stance that the appeal behind selfies, self-trackers, and self-quantifiers is rooted in a desire for self-improvement. She sees selfies primarily as a way for people to reclaim representations of themselves, to take control of their image and manipulate in whatever ways they see fit. For example, Rettberg describes how selfies can be ways for people of colorto reclaim images of themselves that do not always show up very clearly due to filters designed for white bodies only. Similarly, she sees self-trackers and self-quantifiers as ways for people to handle and control their own data about themselves, to find empowerment in tracking for themselves the number of steps taken or the amount of calories consumed. She uses the examples of mothers monitoring a baby’s feedings and weight gain as an example of a group finding empowerment in the ease and accessibility of self-quantification.

Of course, Rettberg acknowledges that the feeling of control implicated in selfie-taking and self-tracking is complicated by the fact that digital data gets publicly sold to marketers on the hunt for consumers. Indeed, in Chapter 6 in particular, Rettberg acknowledges how challenging it is for consumers to hide their personal data, suggesting even that only the very wealthy and the very technologically savvy can keep their purchases away from companies that sell their data to marketers. In other words, she acknowledges that it is nearly impossible in a digital age to hide one’s consumer identity on the Web, leading to problematic breaches in privacy and identity protection.

With all of that said, Rettberg’s book is much less concerned with fear-mongering than it is with suggesting how powerful digital tools can be for giving users flexible tools and options for tracking their lives. Interspersed throughout discussions of the selfie’s history and the development of the self-quantification movement, Rettberg often describes her own experiences trying and using digital tracking tools for herself. One of the most powerful examples is when she describes the days she spends using a tool called, “The Narrative Clip,” a camera that gets clipped onto clothing and takes a photo from the wearer’s perspective every thirty seconds (52-53). The Narrative Clip claims to give a user’s life a “photographic memory,” a collection of photos taken throughout the entire day.

Even though the Narrative Clip is intended to capture the immediacy, and “the truth” of everyday life, Rettberg soon finds how inadequate the Narrative Clip is for capturing the daily moments important to her. The first problem Rettberg encounters is that the clip does not take photos at an angle that is at eye level for her; she realizes that the clip was designed for a “flat-chested” individual who could place the camera at chest-level and have the camera take pictures straight ahead. Because Rettberg has to accommodate her breasts, however, she must angle the camera upwards; the pictures all turn out to be photos of the sky or the buildings above her.

When Rettberg moves the camera to hip level, she encounters a similar problem; the camera is more drawn to taking photos of advertisements on walls and of strangers in coffee shops than of the children she picks up from school. By describing experiences like using the Narrative Clip, Rettberg does great work of showing both how selfies and self-quantified tools can be empowering, but also how they can be ineffectual at living up to their purported goals.

She ultimately finds that, in spite of the machine’s limitations, the human control over self-representation and self-tracking remains powerful. At the end of the book, she asserts that, “We no longer need to rely on others to represent us” (88).  While thinkers like Keen may find that status updates are a form of giving up ourselves to the digital, Rettberg, in contrast, asserts that status updates are a way to reclaim ourselves through the digital, to use the medium of the digital to make our own lives and positions clearer and more equitable. I found this conclusion particularly appealing and appreciate that it complicates the assumption that mediation necessarily means a loss of human control. Books like Rettberg’s continue to add to conversations about digital mediation and the ways that it impacts human relationships and understandings of the self.