This idea resonated with me as I continued to read about Ratliff's attempted vanishing act. What is more intriguing to me is that people actually succeed in having completely different online lives from what they live everyday in the real world. People can post Photoshopped pictures or pictures that they just found online to try and give themselves a "better" face. They can say they are younger, more active, and overall more appealing to the outside world. Online, it is possible to vanish from your life in reality.
In reality, though, it is much more difficult to vanish from life online. Everything is traceable, everything can be recorded or tracked, and viewed by other people. Kudos to Evan for going to so far and taking the extra measures to "vanish." I was so impressed by everything that he did - and more so by the crazy things that people did to try and find him, and that they did. There's no way that I would have been able to follow the micro-tracks that he left, or take the time to analyze his recent behaviors before his vanishing act to try and predict what he would do next.
In a way, I think it was inevitable that he would be found - technology is everywhere, and it can get you. There really is no way to hide from it, and I think Evan Ratliff's attempt proves it.
Among the MANY issues raised in this article is the durability of our online identities. Acts of identity - acts that might be fleeting in a F2F setting - are, as you say, "recorded or tracked" all over the internet. As such, it's become MUCH more difficult to hide from ourselves...
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