If you haven’t conducted this experiment yet, visit the MIT Personas project and type your name into the search field. What comes out is a visual representation of your digital self. As noted on the project page, “Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.”

Over the past year, we’ve been researching extensively the topic of digital identity. Not surprisingly, a lot of the theory we explore directly affects our day-to-day lives and how we interact online. As an example, I’m finding a growing “identity divide” as my various social graphs intersect (or more importantly don’t intersect) with my digital self. To put it bluntly, it’s becoming increasingly uncanny how my online persona—instead of converging—is in many ways actually diverging from the “real” me.

Why is this? One reason is that many of our most significant interactions—those with family and close friends—occur offline and are not captured as part of our digital identities. I think the bigger reason is that we’re constantly reminded that our digital identities are entities that need to be managed