The Personal Aspect of Blogging About Digital Identity

Ever since I got introduced to the task of building a blog as part of the MA course Digital Identities, I have been skeptic. For starters I do not feel like 'sharing' more than I already do on several social media (I mean: What do I need to share more of with the world?) Secondly I had a hard time building a blog without any overall purpose: What should the blog be about? How often should I post? Who would be my readers? Would there be any readers? And if not, I was back to the overall question of the purpose of the whole thing.

When creating this blog, I decided not to allow search engines to be able to find it. I did this because I did not want the fragmentary, unpolished, unfinished and messy blog to be part of my digital identity (i.e. Google search results for my name). That was my first thought anyway. But since then I have realized that I do not want the blog to be searchable because of the personal aspect of it. I have come to realize how personal this sharing of digital identity is. Being online, building myself an online alter ego(?) is part of me - and writing about the history of my online social self is like telling someone about my childhood memories. It actually felt that way.

This got me thinking: Is the 'digital social me' any less real than the 'analogue social me'?