Databody Your Databody is the sum of the datatraces you ever left on the Internet. It is continuously beeing processd and reprocessed by the structures of the net. Granted that a person manifests him-, her- or itself not in the physical person itself but through how he, she or it is perceived by others, one can say that there is no "real" or just one "true" person, but many equally important ones which change according to how and by whom a person is perceived. This train of thought is important in understanding databodies because anyone searching for information on a person, be it an actual human or an Internet search-bot (a machine) constructs that personality out of the information they found. On the Internet, personal information can easily be found for instance upon entering a person's name, e-mail, nickname into search-engine. This kind of encounter with that person is a construction, is being mediated by the search-engine and does not take place in "real time". Old and new , relevant and unrelevant information can often not be distinguished easily. Upon searching for a certain person one might even encounter a mix of multiple persons by the same name in a search result. Search results also vary according to which search-engine one uses and on how much information there is on a person. Textual information can easily be copied out of one context and pasted into another and that context might be indexed by different search-engines which then present it to to someone querying for a name in their own way. digitized personal (information is ever changing as it is processed and reprocessed by search-engines and surfers, humans and machines. legend: 1. A person is active on the net. 2. They leave traces on the net. (such as postings, newsgroup mails, publications, sign-up information, etc. ) 3. These are processed by the net (cashed, deleted, copied, quoted, etc.) This processed information is the DataBody. 4. Only a part of it is found by a "searcher". 5. Through the perception the personality is constructed. Two important points are visualized in the infographic above: - The basis for the generation of a personality is the databody, whitch is theoreticaly exacttly definable because it contains all the datatraces that a person has left on the Internet. - There is very little chance to exert influence over one's own databody because it is being constructed by the structures and mechanisms of the net.