My Shadow Body-Austin Coppernoll

     I began my brief journey into the online traces of my personal "shadow body" by plugging personal information into White Pages, American FactFinder, Access Dane, and the NYT Mapping America infographic.  On White Pages, I found a minimal amount of personal information about myself giving just enough of a trace to want to pique one's interest, if they really wanted to, into purchasing further facts about me, be they accurate or not.  I've always wondered if paying the money to get more personal information on a reverse phone number lookup is actually helpful or accurate.  FactFinder didn't yield anything interesting.  Access Dane came up with the most frighteningly interesting results as it revealed the owner of my home property (my mother) and lots of information on the home itself such as its assessed value, perfectly complemented by a creepy overhead shot of the home from Google Maps.  Mapping America did little more than reveal the obvious to me in my predominantly white, middle-class, democrat-driven community.

     Many of the more interesting results came about in my Google search that I performed under my own name.  Several links pointed to one Mandy Austin Coppernoll, apparently a rather prominent name above my own.  The first link actually related to me was of my Twitter profile of which I would do well to clean up a bit as it's mostly made up of crude language and mushy mush.  The next link relating to me was to my Youtube profile of which I had posted videos in the past.  The link after that was to a Pheed profile I created, which ranked a lot higher in the search results than I expected as I made the profile a couple of years ago when I thought it was going to take off but effectively did nothing with it.  I really enjoyed the following link that led to the Herald-Independent's article on me featuring my Youtube "podcast" of sorts.  The last result on the first page was of a comment I had made on my Youtube profile through Google Plus towards a prominent video game vlogger/let's player.  Going past the first page would have, of course, been foolish.  My Facebook page apparently couldn't be found by the first and consequently placed on the first page as I hadn't included my middle Facebook name "Lake", which you would think the Google algorithms would be able to work around, but I guess not.

     What really scared me was what I saw in the image results.  The first image was of my twitter profile picture.  A later image was a profile picture of my girlfriend's sister and her boyfriend (very creepy and unrelated).  Some other mentionables:  Pictures I didn't even know were taken of me at a Rotary picnic event, an old Facebook profile picture, a snapshot from a highlight video I did for Jessie Vetter, and another snapshot from one of my "podcasts."  The image results, in all of its relativity, struck me as creepy, invasive, and strangely intriguing.  Where and how these ties were drawn from one link or image to the next baffles me.  Looking from the outside in I believe an onlooker would find me to be a girlfriend-obsessed, picnic-partaking failure of a podcaster.  That being said, I doubt doing a search on my name would lead the individual to anything fully conclusive on who I am as a person beyond the way I express myself through Twitter.  The searches only scratch the surface of my background, albeit more of the surface than I had ever anticipated.  This is most likely attributed to the fact that I am just a 19-year-old delinquent.