So does identity equal reputation? After all this is the claim made by some identity practitioners such as Dick Hardt (Hardt, 2006). The simple answer is no. Does it matter? And the answer is yes, it matters a lot.
Today in our digitised society your digital identity is quite simply an entry in a database, an object in duplicate, triplicate and much more, copied over numerous disparate directories scattered across the globe. Conversely your reputation is worth significant value to you but to others nothing, unless they use your reputation to add value to their own. To all intents and purposes your identity is worth a piece of gold to those motivated to collect, use and abuse identities. For your reputation, everything you publish online has most likely been copied and replicated to another server or indexed and cached by some search engine. For this reason your reputation has a persistence value that it did not have before.
Your digital identity and anything that links to you, including the digital residue you leave in your wake, is a gold mine for gold diggers. However your digital reputation is not worth stealing. Yet it is worth nurturing. In essence your online reputation can attain a value that may not reflect accurately the person sitting behind. It is by using your reputation that you can online create a type of personal branding. Once you have separated your reputation from your identity it becomes quite straightforward to take it and manage it. Your reputation could possibly, be divided into three phases: (1) what you did before, (2) what you are doing now and in your lifetime, and finally (3) what happens after you die. It takes skill to manage your digital reputation effectively.
Your identity needs to be protected and your reputation needs nurturing. What’s more is that your identity can make money for “gold diggers”, whereas your reputation is of no value except for what you make of it; and then its subjective value is of worth only to yourself.
But how can you protect your digital identity and nurture your digital reputation, if you do not own them, or even control them? I will be posting more on this in following weeks 😉
One Reply to “Identity = Reputation?”