The view from space.
I was early to Facebook, signing up when you required some kind of institutional email (in my case my Uvic one) to gain access. This isn’t a hipster statement (that’d be me pointing out that my original email address was doug@ some variety of warm email service before the spam became completely unmanageable and I abandoned it), but more an admission that I have been able to live through the phases of the site. Crucially, during the vague-posting and farmville-invite era I was just some guy, and didn’t bother too much with what I posted. Eventually, it really became a platform for me to advertise my band’s shows, then a place to put poorly-composed photos from holidays, before eventually arriving as something I hardly ever post on but use instead as the basis for the messenger app. I’m kind of over Zuckerberg, but realize the platform is too big to completely abandon; at the risk of being glib, it’s still the meta (gamers unite!) for my online circles.
When becoming a teacher, I had a robot-based revelation and worked to sanitize my presence online. Privacy settings were set to the maximum I could achieve, I became hidden from search engines, and people had to know someone I knew to find me. I kind of reverted it to being my own private club, not unlike the initial incarnation of the platform. This roughly matched the timeline where Facebook started to recede somewhat in popularity, which was perhaps overdue: my data had probably been harvested enough in that interval to satisfy the tech barons, anyways.
Something drew me to continue to find the type of online community from the mid/late aughts, however. I was still travelling, taking better photos… surely someone would be interested? Thus I was drawn into Instagram, though under a vaguely secret moniker related to a long-planned holiday between my wife’s 40th birthday and my own that we took. Call it a mid-life crisis if you want, but we were quite happy to travel between the birthdays:
https://www.instagram.com/40to40travel/
The obfuscation wasn’t really meant to be impenetrable – you can see my face there, after all – but it’s a space I consider immeasurably more than my earlier social media flailings: I’m not pictured drinking alcohol, wearing robot costumes, getting my head shaved into a mohawk before a gig…any of the stuff I enjoyed in my 20’s. If anything it’s an attempt to show that I moved my photographic skills forward. I’m unsure of the audience; my wife’s cousins like it. That’s nice. I don’t think they are likely to create dodgy deepfakes of me based on a picture where I’m standing in front of Gyeongbukgung palace.
An enterprising potential future boss might be able to find this account, or connect it to my YouTube channel of the same name, and I’ve curated it to be OK, should it happen. The worst fallout I can anticipate would be someone correctly suggesting I was a crappy video editor when I first started to post videos… but then again, I was learning. Over-using ‘fades to black’ isn’t going to be the thing that gets be wrung up by an online umpire; I’m fine with showing the process of becoming better at that skill.
What I do find a bit odd, as I’ve been once again looking into it, is the advent of AI summaries being popped out with every Google search. A student at my school wrote an article for the local newspaper for a school project, wherein he interviewed me about my current interest in reviving the school’s rugby program. I mentioned that I got the interest while I was working at Auckland Grammar school in New Zealand. The article the student wrote was also about another sport (ultimate frisbee) that was concurrently being revived by someone else.
I have run my name and location through Google a few times, and the AI summary seems to be very interested in this article. Here’s what it comes up with:
My employment is public record – it can’t and shouldn’t be hidden – but while I have love for ultimate frisbee as a tall guy who can run, I have never coached it even once. I don’t even have rugby coaching expertise (I’m more of an enthusiast, whose parents would never have let me play), and am about to enter a third year of trying to get a 7’s team on the field. That only requires about ten players! What kind of expert am I? – I hardly understand the byzantine rules of the ruck, and clearly have more experience in media than ‘actual’ scrums.
Could this put me in a situation where I was over-relied on? What if the thing that go me ‘in the door’ was an AI summary of a child’s newspaper article, and I was revealed to be what could charitably be called a ‘novice’ coach, after all? Would that be a species of fraud via someone else letting an AI research for them? I just wanted to help a nice student write an article for the newspaper, and now I have an AI-based mini existential crisis!
Thankfully I’m in steady employment, so this being an issue is quite unlikely. It could be a warning, though, about sample size: through minimizing my publicly-visible digital identity, I maximize anything that’s out there as far as AI is concerned. If my singular piece of press was for something unsavoury, I’d be in a real sticky wicket (sorry, wrong Anglo-centric sport).
A lateral thinker could probably enjoy my photography, and I invite people to do so, if they tried hard enough to find it. If a potential employer wanted to see if I had the ‘right stuff’ to helm a rugby program…they probably shouldn’t rely on AI alone to make my decision. I mean, I might be worth a try. (pauses)
If you run your name and location through a search engine, does AI suggest anything inaccurate about you? I might well be an experienced coach in the future, but the internet thinking I am right now is aspirational at best. Let’s see where the egg bounces!
(p.s. I’m actually rather fond of my Malaysia–>Australia video; I really should get around to finishing the series. Check it out if you want – you have all the info you need to find it, cyber-sleuths!)