While personal name searches have grown dramatically over the past five years and the explosion of the participatory Web has increased the size of our active digital footprint, few internet users have made digital identity management a routine part of their online lives.

Indeed, identity management is not an urgent need for most people. Few are currently required to make themselves available online as part of their job, and few have had a bad experience because of embarrassing or inaccurate information posted online.

However, as the Pew Internet Project has noted in previous research, the way people think about the internet’s role in their lives tends to change over time, often through the experience of significant or transitional moments. One might learn through the course of changing jobs, for instance, that the internet can be an indispensable resource for professional networking, but the heated debates of a local neighborhood organization are best left off of the searchable, public Web (where potential employers might look). And because these learning moments—whether experienced individually or collectively—tend to occur over time, the pace with which users might change their approaches to online identity will necessarily tempered by the pace of those experiences.