Ex-baseball Player, Musician, or Scholar — Who Exactly Is Dalton Zbierski?

 Dig­i­tal Footprint

Google is an inter­est­ing piece of tech­nol­o­gy. It’s so use­ful — when using it to research a name non-affil­i­at­ed with yours. Google is a tough sub­ject for many peo­ple because of the fact it is often per­ma­nent. For instance, my non-scholas­tic twit­ter is the sec­ond piece of infor­ma­tion that comes up after search­ing my name. I don’t have any­thing incrim­i­nat­ing on that account but I did cre­ate an aca­d­e­m­ic han­dle, also vis­i­ble, at the begin­ning of the semes­ter. It would be in my best inter­est to pri­vate my per­son­al han­dle and I plan to do so.

I’ve been “Google-able” for awhile. That does­n’t mean I’m impor­tant but it means if you search my name from a ran­dom com­put­er, google will fill in your words and direct you to con­tent regard­ing myself. Eighty per­cent of the stu­dents in this class­room could most like­ly make that claim. The rea­son behind the finite pub­lic­i­ty I pos­sess dates back to the mid­dle school years. I par­tic­i­pat­ed in an event called His­to­ry Day, and won on mul­ti­ple occa­sions. I advanced from the local com­pe­ti­tion five times. I placed at the state com­pe­ti­tion three times. I won the state com­pe­ti­tion twice, land­ing me in Col­lege Park, MD at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land for the nation­al com­pe­ti­tion on both occasions.

The most inter­est­ing piece I could find on myself dat­ed back to 1998 when I was three years old, although the post mis­tak­ing­ly says I was four. For decades my grand­fa­ther attend­ed Stafford Motor Speed­way. And for the first decade of my life I accom­pa­nied him. Online, in an arti­cle read­ing “Past Fan Post Entries” one can find a para­graph in which my grand­fa­ther describes a very young Dal­ton await­ing a vis­it from Nascar dri­ver Steve Park. He had just come off a nasty acci­dent and I was there to wish him the best in his return to stock car rac­ing. It’s irrel­e­vant, hon­est­ly, but it holds a huge sen­ti­men­tal val­ue to me and I hope its date allows it to remain on the first cou­ple pages of a “Dal­ton Zbier­s­ki” google search no mat­ter how far my life may take me.

My online pres­ence is just okay. There isn’t much writ­ten because I am not a high­ly pub­lic per­son. I don’t use social media at an extreme amount and don’t have much of an online pres­ence. Music is a huge part of my life but I do not use the name “Dal­ton Zbier­s­ki” for my music so it does­n’t appear at a very high rate when my name is searched. I try my best to sep­a­rate music from my per­son­al name. My friend who plays pro­fes­sion­al foot­ball will not even allow me to men­tion his “gov­ern­ment” name with con­nec­tion to music, teams don’t want to see that. If I look to become a jour­nal­ist I will hope to cre­ate a stronger online pres­ence. About fif­teen to twen­ty arti­cles I’ve writ­ten for the Dai­ly Cam­pus appear when my name is searched so I am off to a pos­i­tive start.

Trust Trans­lates to Value

Being able to trust the cred­i­bil­i­ty of an indi­vid­ual one “googles” is huge. I know who am, but do you? Prob­a­bly not. I don’t want to paint a mis­con­strued por­trait of who exact­ly Dal­ton Zbier­s­ki is when the afore­men­tioned name is searched. I am in the infant stages of cre­at­ing an online pro­file but will con­tin­ue to work at its con­struc­tion. Music does not hurt my online pres­ence but it makes it dif­fi­cult. I have to watch what I say because I know it can be traced back to me. If I come out with an album like Eminem’s and in three years choose to drop music for radio I will very like­ly have prob­lems. It’s hard because musi­cal­ly I want to say what I want. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m get­ting very good. But at this stage I haven’t accom­plished any­thing. Out­side of hav­ing sev­er­al impres­sive per­for­mances under my resume I have no name. Right now I am split between endeav­ors. Ded­i­cat­ing myself to cre­at­ing an online pres­ence does not seem nec­es­sary YET. I con­tin­ue to devel­op my skills in both jour­nal­ism and music and cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties at both. When I have estab­lished a true career path, one of which will no longer con­flict with the prospect of the oth­er, I can ded­i­cate myself to putting my whole body of work into its pur­suit. Cre­at­ing an online pres­ence will fol­low in the foot­steps of that scenario.