My E-dentity

I'm not going to lie, googling yourself is a disconcerting experience.  Even with a pretty sub-average on-line presence, I was surprised to find about three google pages with links to me.  However, once I got past the initial shock of how visible my life is to the world, I realized that the information reminded me of a garbage dump of sorts.  There were remnants of high school projects, including a half finished Prezi about the transcendentalism of Disney princesses and a music video that my friend Katie and I made for our Spanish Class.  There were results from swim meets both from recent college meets and distant past club meets.  There was even a Vine that I had created during the one month that I used the site as well as a Pintrest account that I have never used.

 Of course, there were also links to social media accounts that I do use on a regular basis.  The first that came up was my twitter account.  Although lately I have not been much of a "tweeter", in high school I used the site quite a bit.  According to my profile, I have tweeted 974 times and favorited 1774 tweets.  I have 118 followers, and I follow 111 people.  Reading through my tweets, I still find some that make me laugh, but some are rather cringe-worthy.  Sometimes its easy to forget that these thoughts that seem so important or hilarious at the time will stay on the internet forever, even once they've lost their context.

Some Examples

How riveting Kristin, tell me more!

Ok, I still find this one funny

#wut



Although I did not find any links to my instagram page on Google, there were links to it from my twitter, so I decided to look through that one next.  I use instagram more than twitter now, for the most part.  I've never been much of a selfie person, and most of my pictures are either with a group of of my friends, of food, or swimming related.  My top three "liked" pictures are as follows:

 



Interestingly enough, the second picture went viral in the swimming world just recently.  Our coach decided that he wanted to take a picture of us "dying" during our winter training sessions.  He then sent the picture to SwimSwam, a multimedia news organization for all things swimming.  They put it on their instagram feed, and other swimming twitter accounts subsequently picked it up and tweeted to the world.  I even got a special shout out on the SwimSwam account, as you can see:

Yep, that's me in the green suit
http://instagram.com/p/xzdqwTBj6K/?modal=true

I could also look at my Facebook page, but the only things that I really post on it are my instagram pictures, plus I get tagged in all of my friends' photos.  And because most of my friends are swimmers, nearly all of my pictures are somehow swimming related. 

After spending far too long looking through my social media history, it is obvious that my two top trends for posts are swimming and school.  And, honestly, those are the two most important things in my life thus far.  I have made all of my friends and spent most of my time in these activities during my young life.  Although the information about these things might be a little random online, they are still the most prominent things about me that are available, and I am ok with that.  Other people I know might have more pictures of them going to parties with a lot of friends, or selfies of themselves, but that isn't really who I am.  I'm also not one of those people who posts really artsy photos with an intellectual caption.  There isn't anything wrong with these online personas, but I like that my "e-dentity" shows me doing the things I like best: learning, swimming, and hanging out with my friends.


*If you want to watch me embarrass myself in some old Spanish class videos, click on these links.  You will not be disappointed.
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=2037151945588
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1jtc1r8jQ