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hat is your primary role in the Digital Tattoo project?
My primary role with the Digital Tattoo project seems to be content creation, which can mean a lot of different things. Sometimes it’s writing blog posts, other times it’s updating or creating learning modules, or making videos, or posting to social media. Recently, it meant presenting the Connect: Exposed blog series to interested staff.
When did you start working with the Digital Tattoo Team (semester/year)?
I started with the Digital Tattoo project in April or May of 2016.
How did you get involved in Digital Tattoo?
I found out about the Digital Tattoo project through UBC’s Work / Learn opportunities. Amongst all the positions that they had available, the Digital Tattoo interested me the most. I’m fascinated by the interaction of our online and offline identities.
Why do you believe Digital Tattoo is an important initiative?
As our lives are conducted increasingly online, we have to continuously interrogate the ways in which we’re being represented digitally. Our laws can’t match the pace that technology is advancing. Specifically, I see a tension being created between privacy and progress—or someone’s notion of progress. Because we’re caught in between this tension, there’s a great need for digital identity advocacy work in this space.
What do you hope that readers will get out of Digital Tattoo?
I hope that readers of the Digital Tattoo come away with many questions. The idea is to not be proscriptive about what should happen, but to raise concerns that people might not otherwise be considering. There’s a lot of noise about different issues and I believe that the Digital Tattoo is in a position to sort through complicated ethical dilemmas and offer new perspectives to people who seek understand their digital identities a little better.
What is your current professional role?
I don’t really have a professional role, at this time. I’m studying journalism at the graduate level and aspire to become a journalist, but don’t really view that occupation as a profession.
Do you have any pets?
I have a dog named Qena from the SPCA. Previously, I had a dog named Cairo from the SPCA. They’re very similar in many ways: from the same place, of the same size, similar mix of different breeds, same histories. But they have/had very different personalities.
What’s one thing you can’t recommend enough?
Reading fiction. It has been one of the greatest influences on my life. To get poetical about it: I think it opens me up to new worlds and new possibilities and expands my horizons beyond their otherwise earthly bounds.
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