Metaphors of Visibility: Rhetorical Practices in the Normalization of Individual Online Image Management

Introduction

In April 2019, a Washington Post headline announced “A new rite of passage for NFL draft hopefuls.” The new ritual? “Scrubbing your social media history” (Stubbs, 2019). As social media monitoring has become a more frequent practice among professional and college sports teams, American high school and college students have been encouraged to regularly vet and delete posts that might harm their opportunities for recruitment. To avoid the controversies that can result from online content, college athletics departments have begun hiring staff dedicated to reviewing everything athletes post online. While some schools assign this responsibility internally, others have outsourced social media monitoring to a relatively new class of promotional intermediaries: online reputation management (ORM) companies (see also Ho, 2011).

Over the past 15 years, the ORM industry has emerged to help individuals and businesses protect and promote their digital identities. While many companies cater to businesses, offering more traditional public relations services, some companies provide assistance to individuals looking to repair a damaged online reputation or capitalize on their digital profile. In fact, the field has grown large enough that some companies have developed even more narrow specializations. Reputation management companies that specialize in athletes’ images, for example, promote services to colleges that include social media monitoring and educational programs intended to teach student athletes about smart uses of social media (Brunt, 2018). These services, which can include regular reports to coaches on their players’ online activities, are promoted as helping to avoid reputational damage for athletes and for the educational institutions they represent.

Legal scholarship has questioned the privacy and free speech implications of services that monitor student athletes’ social media profiles and reprimand them for content identified as problematic (see Leslie, 2008; Mayer, 2013). This article, however, takes a different approach: it asks how this emergent class of promotional intermediaries—those that monitor and report on social media identities—apply promotional logics that are prevalent in advertising, marketing, and public relations, to individual reputations. Specifically, the article explores how the industry’s presentation of “strategic transparency” (Draper, 2019b) as a salve for anxieties about how our digital identities are constructed, encountered, and interpreted creates a market for digital reputation management services.

Inherent in the logic of contemporary digital life are requirements for visibility. Consider, for example, the colloquialism “pics or it didn’t happen,” or the argument that the absence of a digital profile might raise concerns about a person’s authenticity—or even their existence. And yet, this incitement to be public is accompanied by inherent risks. Young people, in particular, are often told to be careful what they post online and warned about the consequences of oversharing. There is an implicit tension created through these obligations to be seen: the requirement to strike a balance between sharing too much and not sharing enough.

While this predicament may be particularly fraught for those, like college athletes, who have or seek public recognition, the struggle to navigate visibility is not limited to those with a public profile. Indeed, scholars have argued that visibility is necessary for engagement in various arenas including blogging and social media (Duffy, 2017), social justice (Banet-Weiser, 2018), and academia (Duffy & Pooley, 2017). In fact, few areas of contemporary life escape the obligation to be seen.

For more than a decade, companies in the ORM industry ¹ have stressed the role individuals play in protecting, promoting, and capitalizing on their digital image (for a more detailed history of this industry, see Draper, 2019b). Medeiros (2017) describes ORM companies as acting on behalf of clients to monitor their online image, boost positive content, and, in some circumstances, negotiate for the removal of unflattering material. The industry acts as an extra-legal channel to help individuals combat “embarrassing but largely nonactionable speech that tend[s] to dominate search results.” In so doing, these companies “mitigate the concern that readers will form inaccurate or unduly harsh judgments based on cursory examination of the information contained in search results” (Medeiros, 2017, p. 15). I have argued elsewhere that when the industry first emerged around 2005, ORM companies were primarily focused on responding to online identity crises—an unwanted post, picture, or review that was causing social or economic distress (Draper, 2019b).

Companies across this industry have since expanded their efforts outside image repair to include identity protection and promotion—a move that broadens their potential client pool beyond those experiencing an immediate image crisis (Draper, 2019b). Industry representatives now argue that everyone has an online reputation. And while they stress that all digital reputations have the potential to be valuable—something they refer to as “digital equity” (Strasser, 2013) or “identity capital” (Erskine, 2017)—they also warn that every digital reputation is vulnerable. For example, while a high school senior’s college application may be enhanced by a social media profile rich with references to volunteering and extracurricular activities, some posts may be interpreted by admissions officers as indicating questionable moral character. To balance these benefits and risks, companies across this industry help clients build, monitor, and defend their digital image. Through their efforts to “achieve legitimacy for their [. . .] clients,” these companies are part of a class of professionals Melissa Aronczyk refers to as promotional intermediaries (2015, p. 2010). Aronczyk describes how these professionals use public relations and media management strategies to generate greater trust and legitimacy within political systems. Here, the application of promotional logics is applied, not to politics, but to individuals.

My research on the ORM industry is part of a larger project that examines the industrialization of privacy protection and its commercialization at the turn of the 21st century (Draper, 2019b). In this article, however, I draw on scholarship on metaphor and risk to demonstrate how the strategies used by companies across this industry have helped to cultivate feelings of reputational anxiety (Draper, 2019a) as an inevitable—but ultimately controllable—part of contemporary life. It is through this construction of reputational risk as universal, but manageable, that those in the ORM industry foster a continued market for their services.

Identity Capital: The Value of Visibility

In a 1996 article in the Journal of Adolescence, James Côté introduces the term identity capital as a theoretical framework to examine how individuals negotiate life choices in individualistic and risk-oriented societies. “The term ‘identity capital’ denotes what individuals ‘invest’ in ‘who they are.’ These investments potentially reap future dividends in the ‘identity markets’ of late-modern communities” (Côté, 1996, p. 425). In adapting this term, psychologist Meg Jay explains how the accumulation of identity capital can help people—and particularly young people—navigate an identity crisis:

Identity capital is our collection of personal assets. It is the repertoire of individual resources that we assemble over time. These are the investments we make in ourselves, the things we do well enough, or long enough, that they become a part of who we are. Some identity capital goes on a résumé, such as degrees, jobs, test scores, and clubs. Other identity capital is more personal, such as how we speak, where we are from, how we solve problems, how we look. Identity capital is how we build ourselves—bit by bit, over time. (Jay, 2013)

Those in the ORM industry have seized on and expanded the notion of identity capital—an instrumentalized adaptation of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital—to explain the wisdom of treating one’s online identity as a resource that can be mined for value (e.g., Erskine, 2017). Crucially for this industry, however, a digital image can also be a target for gossip, rumors, or other unwanted attention (e.g., Fertik & Thompson, 2010). Consequently, identity capital becomes an asset that requires ongoing monitoring, diversification, and investment. A key component of this approach is a continual effort to achieve a purposeful visibility: publicity without full transparency.

Reputation management is a core component of modern business strategies. Companies use publicity as a way to promote their organizations and divert attention from information that threatens its brand (Edwards, 2020). The ORM industry applies strategies honed in corporate public relations to assist individuals in the protection and sale of their online image. These forms of labor are most evident in appeals for individuals to cultivate a compelling self-brand. By asking individuals to invest in promotional logics that demand both the publication and obfuscation of information (Aronczyk et al., 2017), self-branding positions a person’s image as a source of capital that can be grown through strategic communication efforts. In precarious labor environments, self-branding is sold as a necessary precaution against unpredictable employment (Duffy, 2017; Duffy & Hund, 2015; Gandini, 2016; Hearn, 2010; Marwick, 2013).

In this issue, Edwards (2020) describes a conceptual distinction between corporate strategies focused on publicity and those engaged in efforts at transparency. While the latter is generally associated with virtuous motives aimed at strengthening democratic efforts, the former is more closely aligned with commercial self-interest (see also Birchall, 2014). Edwards argues, however, there are instances in which transparency efforts can aim to shift public attention and obscure information a company would prefer remained hidden. Conversely, publicity, though commonly associated with more selfish motivations, can be deployed to achieve civic ends.

Those in the ORM industry identify transparency as a condition of modern life. To guard against the assumed reality that we are required to be visible, ORM practitioners adopt a series of strategies that closely adhere to Edwards’ definition of publicity, including the creation and promotion of positive material to minimize the visibility of less favorable content. Nevertheless, when industry actors talk about individual image management, they tend to use language that signals the kinds of authentic self-expression more closely aligned with Edwards’ discussion of transparency. For example, in one guide to managing and monitoring online reputations, ORM consultants and practitioners argue that authenticity is central to building trust online. They describe trust as more easily achieved when people feel a person is being real, rather than building a false front. While they stress that revealing too much information can damage a person’s credibility, they remind readers that “we live in a transparent world and your personal side will appear online, like it or not, so it might as well come from you” (Beal & Strauss, 2008, p. 56).

Implicit here is a concern that while trust is facilitated by a certain degree of visibility, the motives of those seen as working “too hard” to promote themselves may be viewed with suspicion. Conversely, the motives of those sharing insights into their personal lives—in the absence of obvious commercial goals—tend to be viewed more generously. Much of this analysis gets read through the prism of authenticity as in the claim that “[t]ruth, honesty, and authenticity are required if you want to have a good reputation online. Authenticity means, first understanding who you are—your values, mission, or character—and second, speaking from these truths” (Beal & Strauss, 2008, p. 72). Built into this approach is a requirement to use the tropes of transparency to avoid the valence of self-interest Edwards argues is commonly associated with publicity. ²

Elsewhere, I have referred to this version of self-presentation promoted in the ORM industry as “strategic transparency” (Draper, 2019b, p. 102): a kind of managed visibility that obscures as much as it reveals. As Wood and Aronczyk (2020) describe in the introduction to this special issue. describe in the introduction to this special issue, the power of transparency as a concept is rooted in its construction as a neutral form of information sharing. The prevailing assumption is that transparency is what occurs when there are no efforts to manage or curtail information flow (see also Edwards, 2020). The version of transparency encouraged by companies in the ORM industry—one that claims to direct visibility through the circulation of digital content designed to appeal to search engine logics—troubles any preconception that this approach to transparent self-presentation is an exercise in unmediated communication. Instead, the industry’s strategies offer a practiced and curated transparency that is designed to offer a “publicity-worthy self.” ³ In this way, the language of transparency is applied to individuals and deployed as a promotional strategy (see Wood & Aronczyk, 2020).

Arguments for transparent self-presentation place on individuals the same obligations shared by nations, organizations, and companies whose actions have implications for democratic society. Those in professions and quasi-professions facilitated by social media, including YouTube vloggers and Instagram influencers, experience what Duffy and Hund (2019) describe as a “visibility mandate”—“the directive to ‘put oneself out there’—to a heightened degree” (p. 4984). And while social media influencers respond to acute directives to self-produce as a path to achieving prominence among audiences of fans, followers, brands, and other influencers (see Abidin, 2016), ORM companies extend this “mandate” to everyone with a digital image. They insist that the forms of routine brand management that are essential for those who make a living off of their online image are a universal requirement. Yet even as they stress the importance of this reflexive form of digital grooming and visibility-seeking, these companies stress the risks associated with having an online presence.

Reputation and Risk

Nock (1993) defines reputations as the “shared, or collective, perception about a person” that results from “innumerable contacts among and between people” (p. 2). Presumably then, abiding by social expectations generally blesses a person with a good reputation. Conversely, Nock (1993) observes that “[d]eserved or not, a bad reputation marks someone as an outsider—beyond the ordinary boundaries of our own moral community” (p. 2). Given the loss of community standing that accompanies a poor reputation—and the attendant social, economic, and political consequences—there is considerable incentive for people to work to earn and maintain a positive reputation.

Few authors more vividly relate the risks of a negative reputation than Jane Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, originally published in 1813, Mary Bennett reminds her sisters

that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable—that one false step involves her in endless ruin—that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful—and that she cannot be too much guarded in her behavior towards the undeserving of the other sex. (Austen, 1813/1918, p. 295)

While considerable attention was paid in the 19th century to the weakening of defamation laws to protect the “public man,” the persistent associations between femininity and modesty meant that women faced similar, if less publicly discussed, risks (Allen, 1999; Lake, 2016). Nearly a century after Austen penned Pride and Prejudice, men of means fretted over the challenges presented by new journalistic technologies and practices—particularly photojournalism—for reputation management (see Godkin, 1890; Warren & Brandeis, 1890).

As was the case with the new communication technologies that preceded them, digital media have raised concerns about the diminishing capacity for legal tools to help people as they confront new challenges to their ability to adjudicate or influence their reputations. Meanwhile, the incentives to maintain a positive reputation have only intensified (Draper, 2019b; Duffy & Hund, 2019; Solove, 2008). Since people and institutions frequently turn to digital tools to learn what they can about individuals’ past actions, there are powerful enticements to ensure the information they encounter paints an image that is consistent with one’s own sense of self.

The ORM industry has foregrounded the potential dangers of an undisciplined digital image using frameworks that draw on contemporary discourses of risk. Late modern societies are characterized in part by a preoccupation with risk management—a sense that, through human intervention, we can identify and mitigate threats (Lupton, 1999). In Western societies, the responsibility for risk management has increasingly been transferred to individuals who are tasked with ensuring their own safety and that of their loved ones. Consequently, those individuals who are recognized as posing a potential threat are tasked with reforming their behaviors to conform to expert-endorsed solutions (Lupton, 1999).

Much as incentives to maintain a good reputation encourage adherence to socially accepted behavior, risk assessment is an exercise in establishing and reifying normative assumptions about social belonging. Through their promises to help individuals neutralize threats to their digital image, ORM companies not only position themselves as experts in the identification and management of risk, but also exert social power through their definition of what constitutes a “safe” online identity.

Digital Metaphors

One of the primary means through which the ORM industry articulates reputational risk is through the use of metaphors. Metaphors play an important role in solidifying ambiguous dangers into tangible threats. According to George Lakoff (1993), “Metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning” (p. 244). For example, Daniel Schön (1993) identifies the role metaphors play in social policy as focusing attention on particular issues and framing those issues in ways that demand specific solutions. The use of metaphors of illness to conceptualize housing issues allows neighborhoods to be identified as healthy, congested, decaying, or blighted—terms that themselves suggest probable solutions. As Joni Young (2001) notes, metaphors regarding risk are often used to make chaotic situations feel controllable. To see risk as manageable, Young argues it must first be conceived of as “a thing apart”—an entity that operates within, but separately from, the system it threatens.

Metaphors have played a central role in the social construction and collective understanding of digital technologies as spaces and places (Johnson, 2009; Maglio & Matlock, 1998), consumable and controllable (Puschmann & Burgess, 2014), revolutionary and progressive (Markham, 2003; Wyatt, 2004), or threatening and dangerous (Schulte, 2013). Annette Markham (2003) argues that “metaphoric frames” have helped to guide collective understandings of digital technologies alongside their implementation (see also Tiidenburg, in press). ⁴ In her work on virtual assistants, Miriam Sweeney (2015) argues metaphors facilitate comprehension and comfort by equating an unknown object with a familiar one. Similarly, Meg Leta Jones and Jason Millar (2017) explore how metaphors can anticipate and shape technology regulation and policy by framing “new” problems in terms of existing issues. While metaphors can provide an avenue for engaging with the new and complex through reference to the familiar and understood (Stark & Hoffmann, 2019), Nick Seaver’s (2017) analysis of the term algorithm, and Tarleton Gillespie’s (2010) analysis of the term platform, demonstrate how they can also generate ambiguity and obscure complex sociotechnical processes (see also Tiidenburg, in press).

Luke Stark and Anna Lauren Hoffmann (2019) posit that contemporary metaphors for data may be instructive for constructing an ethics of data work. Popular metaphors for data signal the risks posed by “big data” through language that stresses ubiquity, liquidity, and resistance to being corralled (Stark & Hoffmann, 2019; see also Puschmann & Burgess, 2014). Descriptions of data as the oil, gold, or water of the 21st century, however, also stress the latent value for those with the ambition and tools to harvest it. Oddly, these metaphors ignore the role of human intervention in producing, storing, and analyzing data. Metaphors that identify data as a natural resource or storage as a cloud, for example, are devoid of human actors (Hwang & Levy, 2015; Watson, 2016). By excluding allusions to people, these frameworks of understanding support problematic constructions of data as a raw or naturally existing resource (Gitelman, 2013).

Conversely, the metaphors I examine here offer a sense of embodiment that links the physical and virtual worlds. These metaphors, as Sara Watson (2016) writes, “acknowledge the presence of a person, yet point to the disjuncture between the person and their remaining traces” (para. 14). In so doing, they present risks that cannot be solved by invisibility, instead demanding a form of managed transparency that balances the risks and rewards of publicity.

Imagery and Image Management

I turn now to a discussion of the role of metaphors in the industrialization of risk around digital image management. Identification of these metaphors comes from interviews conducted with members of the ORM industry in 2014 coupled with the evaluation of corporate blogs, promotional material, and related media coverage of those same companies between 2006 and 2016 (see Draper, 2019b). My focus is on three metaphors that arise repeatedly across these discursive spaces: the digital tattoo, the digital footprint, and the digital doppelgänger. While related, each of these metaphors points to a particular set of risks; together they signal a tension around online visibility. ⁵

The digital tattoo metaphor is used to illustrate the risks introduced when regrettable actions become a permanent and visible part of an online identity. ⁶ This term is often employed in warnings to young people regarding the legacies of youthful indiscretion. Digital “tattoos” are introduced as markers of a novel form of transparency: they allow us to be identified, known, and remembered across time and space (Enriquez, 2013). Unlike traditional tattoos, which fade with time and die with their owner, digital tattoos “threaten us with immortality” (Enriquez, 2013). In this usage, it is the tattoo’s longevity that is foregrounded—rather than, perhaps, its symbolism—as a way to focus concerns around fears about the seeming permanence of digital media (see Wagman, 2016).

The phrase digital tattoo has been used to call attention to the consequences one’s online image can have in everyday life. The University of British Columbia’s Digital Tattoo Project, for example, is a student-led initiative designed to encourage young people to actively engage with their online identities. According to the website,

The goal of this site and the Digital Tattoo project is to raise questions, provide examples and links to resources to encourage you to think about your presence online, navigate the issues involved in forming and re-forming your digital identity and learn about your rights and responsibilities as a digital citizen. (Digital Tattoo Project, n.d.)

Details about the threats of digital life, catalogued in the site’s “privacy and surveillance” section, are balanced with the unique opportunities of digital visibility found largely in the “academic and professional lives” sections. In this regard, the University of British Columbia project is an outlier. Discourse around the term digital tattoo tends to focus on taking responsibility for poor decisions, recognizing the permanence of those decisions, and engaging in the time consuming and painful process of removal. The ultimate lesson associated with this term is that it is easier never to create harmful content than it is to try and remove it.

The digital footprint metaphor is used to describe the risks posed by the inevitable traces left as part of everyday, routine interactions with digital systems. Whereas the “digital tattoo” refers most often to visible content, the “digital footprint” illustrates the ways data are collected, stored, and accessed. This metaphor offers a type of universalized risk that is an inevitable condition of everyday life: what privacy and surveillance scholars have generally referred to as the data double (Haggerty & Ericson, 2006, p. 4), data dossier (Solove, 2004), or data shadow (Howard, 2005). While the phrase digital tattoo focuses on “avoidable” missteps, the digital footprint metaphor points to an unavoidable form of visibility: the ways third parties use digital traces to construct versions of us that may or may not reflect the ways we see ourselves.

The alleged threat posed by the digital footprint comes from the ways the data we generate during the course of routine activities are used to impose “digital reputations” (Draper & Turow, 2017). Marketers claim these data profiles can predict future desires and serve just-in-time advertising content to capitalize on those preferences. While this degree of personalization may feel benign or even beneficial, when this logic is applied to measure the likelihood of criminal recidivism, loan default, or child endangerment, the resulting decisions can be far more punitive (Eubanks, 2018).

The digital doppelgänger metaphor refers to another externally imposed threat: a person who shares the user’s name, thereby obscuring their online reputation. By occupying the digital area industry representatives refer to as a user’s “name space,” digital doppelgängers threaten to disrupt and confuse one’s image. In tracing the term’s use in psychology and literature, Piotr Szpunar (2018) defines doppelgänger’s popular meaning as “a look-alike figure that appears to an individual, whose own constitution (and singularity) it puts in doubt” (p. 175). This figure, which Szpunar also refers to as “the Double,” is often a source of anxiety and danger resulting from its introduction of ambiguity into individual and group identities. This danger, orchestrated by the presence of an unknown and uncontrolled other, is manifested in industry discourses that position this digital double as a threat.

Popular articles describe both the pleasures and perils of having a digital doppelgänger. A 2013 story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal reported the serendipitous pleasures some people experience when they run into their virtual other (Grant, 2013). Often this occurs when a person receives an email that was clearly meant for someone who shares their name and, occasionally, their Google search results. The Wall Street Journal article reports on the pleasurable experiences people have tracking down their doubles and even meeting offline.

Alexandra Samuel (2016), writing for JSTOR Daily, describes the less pleasurable sides of these encounters. Samuel describes her digital interlopers as rivals and reports friending them on social media simply to keep track of what they are up to. This is not entirely a practice in narcissism. Samuel argues that, in the contemporary world, we use our social media profiles as our de facto identity signifier. Those who share that signifier, therefore, can pose serious privacy and security risks. If, for example, a minor mistype results in an email requesting you confirm a new account or reset a password goes to one of your doppelgängers, the result may be a serious security breach (Grant, 2013). And while the benign digital doubles from The Wall Street Journal piece might not misuse their access, a more malevolent doppelgänger could.

While footprints and tattoos signal the risks of being too visible—either to other people or to algorithmic systems—the digital doppelgänger identifies the consequences of being “unseen.” It represents the industry’s warning that invisibility carries its own set of risks. Taina Bucher (2012) notes that while the sense of always being watched is a condition that comes with living in a digital panopticon, social media platforms have helped to produce a related, if contradictory, set of fears: that we might go unnoticed. “The problem as it appears is not the possibility of constantly being observed, but the possibility of constantly disappearing, of not being considered important enough” (Bucher, 2012, p. 1171). From this perspective, visibility becomes commensurate with importance (see also Gillespie, 2017).

Metaphors and the Solutions They Offer

At first glance, these metaphors—the digital tattoo, footprint, and doppelgänger—may appear to be interchangeable. In fact, articles on the topic sometimes use the terms as synonyms. But each of these rhetorical tools, as employed by the ORM industry, does discrete work to identify and warn of reputational risks. The digital tattoo metaphor, for example, focuses on the threats we pose to ourselves. These threats, while avoidable, can have significant and long-lasting consequences. Proposed solutions from ORM companies involve careful self-scrutiny and profile maintenance. Companies in this industry offer tools with familiar aesthetics—dashboards, report cards, and credit ratings—to help clients learn about their digital presence with the ultimate goal of removing items flagged as “risk factors.”

Industries including public relations and journalism have adopted radical transparency as a strategy for establishing authenticity and building trust with their publics (Birchall, 2014; Vujnovic & Kruckeberg, 2016). Whereas Clare Birchall (2014) describes transparency as an effort to minimize the impulse to engage in forms of narrative construction—such as gossip and conspiracy theorizing—by providing information in a far less narratively seductive form, she argues radical transparency considers how citizen involvement in determining the scope and scale of information disclosure might create more meaningful revelations. Although the ORM industry argues for the benefits of radical transparency, when their strategies and tools are applied to individuals, the outcome is rarely radical. Instead, the forms of visibility encouraged by this industry more often conform to normative social standards. The result is a kind of identity policing that encourages normative image construction around a set of respectability politics, which Pitcan et al. (2018) refer to as “the vanilla self.” This version of self-presentation, which Bernie Hogan (2010) calls the “lowest common denominator,” operates as a risk mitigation strategy consistent with the ORM industry’s urging that individuals take steps to manage their “digital ink.”

The digital footprint focuses on the threats posed by the less visible digital systems with which we engage. This metaphor considers the consequences of data exhaust—another metaphor—produced as a result of routine digital activities. The production and exposure of these data are treated as inevitable; therefore, solutions offered within the ORM industry involve an accounting of what third parties “know” about us. Similar to tools that assess and analyze a client’s visible reputation, companies offer techniques for digging into available personal information and identifying the pictures those data reveal.

One version of this comes from an industry adjacent to ORM: data brokerage. These companies, which buy and aggregate personal information from myriad third-party sources, have responded to privacy complaints by investing in so-called transparency campaigns. Acxiom, for example, offers users the opportunity to view a version of their data profiles and, if they choose, offer corrections to errors in the data and/or the corresponding profile (Crain, 2018). ⁷ These approaches offer data transparency to assuage concerns that personal information found in a database might be incorrect. By offering individuals the opportunity to rectify inaccuracies, however, these companies distract from a more pressing concern: what kinds of authority and knowledge do these systems claim when they make decisions based on data (see Ananny & Crawford, 2018)? ⁸

Like solutions for addressing the digital tattoo, these strategies claim to empower clients by giving them ownership of their own visibility. By understanding the information—in databases, social media profiles, and search results—that is out there, individuals can ostensibly engage with the systems to correct any inaccuracies and delete any material that may be unwanted. Yet there is an underlying irony here. As Jennifer Whitson and Kevin Haggerty (2008) observe, approaches to self-protection often ask us to further engage with systems that represent the source of the threat. For example, in removing social media posts or generating new content to obscure material that cannot be removed, we are generating new data to feed the very systems from which we are attempting to protect ourselves (see also, Draper, 2019a).

Since the digital doppelgänger metaphor refers to a different problem from either the digital tattoo or the digital footprint, it requires different solutions. Unlike the dangers introduced by too much visibility, the doppelgänger metaphor refers to threats posed by others who may purposely or inadvertently disrupt one’s digital reputation through the contribution of unwanted content. Solutions to this problem, therefore, stress the importance of taking ownership over digital “real estate” through the optimization of quality information and the occupation of one’s “name space.” ORM firms warn about the consequences of this kind of “name collision,” particularly if your digital doppelgänger has a less than savory past (BrandYourself, n.d.). The desire to “stand out” has such purchase that an Atlantic article describes a trend in the United States of new parents using Google search to ensure their child’s name is unique (Beck, 2017).

Separately, these metaphors are each interesting for what they reveal about the construction of identity risk in the digital world, but they are more interesting when we think of them as part of a collective discourse around online reputation. Together, these metaphors identify multiple sources of threat: ourselves, others, and the digital systems with which we engage. This allows for frameworks of risk that result from action, inaction, and ill-considered action. The embodied nature of these metaphors serves to internalize and personalize abstract notions of risk by drawing clear connections between abstract digital forms and the individual bodies they represent.

Moreover, transparency operates as both the risk—as when digital data is presented as an unadulterated representation of the self—and the solution. By making oneself known to digital systems, these companies promise we can be known on our own terms. Since invisibility is treated as risky—as indicated by the digital doppelgänger—industry discourse stresses the importance of being seen. But since being visible also carries risks—as indicated by the digital tattoo—we must practice the “right” kinds of visibility. And since our actions are being monitored—as indicated by the digital footprint—we must be vigilant in ensuring the resulting shadow identities created on our behalf are authentic interpretations of ourselves. The implicit irony is that work an individual does in the service of managing their digital tattoo and thwarting the visibility of their digital doppelgänger—work that Crystal Abidin (2016) calls “visibility labor”—contributes to a deepening of their data footprint.

When taken together, these metaphors help make the case for a digital hygiene regime—yet another metaphor—that consists of a pattern of self-reflection, self-construction, self-promotion, and self-protection. The application of metaphors drawn from public health and applied to personal computing dates back to the 1980s when individuals were learning about virtual threats and the need for computer security. Jussi Parikka (2007) argues computing hygiene became a way of protecting the collective through responsible computing (pp. 150, 161-162). Tung-Hui Hu (2016) extends this metaphor to explain how the imperative toward digital hygiene no longer merely refers to the responsibility an individual user has to purify their data by avoiding contamination from other sources, but a larger provocation that users avoid social risk.

Understood this way, calls for digital hygiene can be interpreted as encouraging individuals to mitigate the dangers posed by their online identity by exercising control over their virtual waste (Hong, 2020; Hu, 2016). And while in some cases this might mean engaging in campaigns to purge unwanted content, the management of waste may also involve decluttering, organization, and display. Digital hygiene evokes the necessity of routine engagement with our digital selves—or what Sun-ha Hong (2020) describes as “an indefinite, routinized ritual” of self-care through self-surveillance (p. 123)—to ensure both presentability and cleanliness.

The ORM industry prescribes visibility and engagement as both source of threat and means of self-defense. It encourages individuals to make themselves known to the very systems that exploit their visibility (Whitson & Haggerty, 2008). This version of digital self-care ensures the continued relevance of an industry that capitalizes on fears about unwanted visibility along with strategies that feed the structures that are the very source of many of those concerns.

Conclusions

According to Sally Wyatt (2004), metaphors are “not only descriptive; they may provide clues to the design intentions of those who use them, and, as such, they may help to shape the cognitive framework within which such actors operate” (p. 244). Together, the metaphors of the digital doppelgänger, digital tattoo, and digital footprint manufacture risks around online identity as persistent, inevitable, and universal, but ultimately manageable. The circulation of these terms between industry and popular discourse has helped cultivate a latent anxiety around digital privacy and online identity that allows companies to go beyond responses to the acute alarm generated at moments of reputational crisis to capitalize on pervasive and everyday anxieties about our digital information.

Young (2001) suggests that alternative metaphors of risk—those that embrace risk as uncertain, chaotic, and uncontrollable instead of manageable through individual choice—may open productive avenues for thinking about how we address uncertainty. Young’s work focuses on the use of metaphors in finance and investment, but her argument can be applied to metaphors regarding digital identity. Metaphors that emphasize the distorted perception that can occur in digital system could reveal the error-prone nature of what John Cheney-Lippold (2011) calls our algorithmic identities. While “digital doppelgänger” hints at issues of misrepresentation and otherness (Szpunar, 2018), phrases such as “fun house mirror” may go further in emphasizing the perversion of identities constructed from the aggregation and analysis of discrete data streams.

While it may be difficult to identify metaphors that suggest shared responsibilities for privacy and information management, doing so may unburden individuals from the impossible responsibility for personal image management online. Consequently, scholars must be careful of the uncritical adoption of metaphors used by promotional industries to shape public anxieties about self-presentation in the digital world.

By considering the language and metaphors used by promotional intermediaries, we reveal how these industries seek to shape our collective understandings of the benefits and burdens of being seen. On the one hand, ORM companies point to visibility to signal importance, relevance, and popularity, all of which they argue can be capitalized on to create social and economic value. On the other hand, visibility is positioned in relation to a set of risks: of overexposure, unwanted exposure, or ill-considered exposure. If navigating the continuously shifting boundaries around visibility has become part of the everyday labor of 21st-century life, we must reflect on the consequences of the metaphors we use to discuss digital privacy and online identities and consider how a shift in this discourse may relieve individuals of the responsibility for controlling the uncontrollable.