The Trans-girl and Social Media

So, have you every watched “Ugly Betty” and thought, “Gee willacres I wonder if magazines are like that in real life, y’all?”

Actually, it is closer to the truth than one would realize. Not the sexy fancy parts – the high-strung, backstabbing, bitchy parts. We are all ego-maniacs, working with no pay, hopped up on caffeine and raging to protect our tiny little kingdoms. I rant like this as it seems I’ve somehow been drawn into an unwanted turf war of my own.

Now, I’m a big girl. I can take all the “man hands” and “dude nice dress” and “that ain’t no woman” comments. I can put up with management telling me, “we show our appreciation for your work, because we haven’t fired you yet.” But, when it bleeds out of the work place onto the internet and into my home, it has gone too far.

This is why after I received some nasty posts from coworkers on my facebook profile, I purged my social networking circles. (BTW, Sérieusement, la déclaration que je suis mentalement – de la défectuosité dans une langue étrangère n’est pas drôle. Vous pensez que nous n’avons pas des babelfish?) I retreated and hid.

I lost many connections between friends, the transgender community, other media professionals and potential job prospects. As a media developer I am expected to be a prime user of the new web interconnectedness but instead I’m a casualty. I should have known better. My initial coming out at work had been relatively successful, and I let my guard down. Now, I am trying to do the impossible and put the genie back in the bottle – I’m trying to go “internet stealth.”

I don’t necessarily agree with it and frankly I don’t know how successful one can be at controlling her image online.
I recently came across this project called “personas” that aggregates postings from around the internet based on just your name alone and derives a set of traits to describe one as an individual. It’s actually quite fascinating.

Looking at this project, it seems that no one is immune. I used it on my father, who never has even turned on a computer, and it found my grandma’s obit featuring all our family’s names. Now, I’ve done the horrid task of googling myself. For the most part I found what one would choose to expect – a My Obama entry, my name on the company masthead, and my Facebook page. It wasn’t until I drilled down about ten pages that I started to find weird things – a YouTube comment and a Twitter aggregator that found me because I used the word “hope” in a post. Employers use even deeper searches such as LexisNexis when they look up prospective employees. This private company delves into your private life deeper than the NSA ever could – so much so that their employment solutions are being used to route out terrorists.

When push comes to shove on the internet, we are all treated like mentally ill terrorists. The landscape changing boon of social media has been way overrated. YouTube and Twitter have yet to make a profit. While I enjoy being able to reach out to my friends and community, the very act of reaching out puts me under greater scrutiny. I’ve only figured two ways out of this. Trying and wipe everything off the internet, or overload it. Right now I’m doing the former. It requires intense dedication to eliminate every cyber footprint, and even though my immediate connections may be clean and safe, one never knows what could be left.

The other option is to overload the system. You know that scene in lawyer movies where the protagonist makes a file request and the opposing council sends everything and the kitchen sink over so he doesn’t have time to find the truth? It’s kind of like that. If one friends everyone, joins everything and doesn’t say anything personal then one can disappear in the cloud. All the white noise of too much bad information can hide anything potentially damaging. This approach is intriguing as it takes advantage of the worst part of the internet – the devaluation of truth. When these principles are applied in a news context, say healthcare reform or the lead up to a war in Iraq, people can drown out trickles of truth with utter nonsense and make it seem that everything is just an opinion and a lie. Applying it to personal details makes it seems that I could be anyone or anything but the ability to find the real me and terrorize me in my home seems far less likely.

Tags: Facebook, googling, harassment, hate mail, image, personal data, personas, safety, Social Media, transgender

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Media, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.