Blog post 2
Blog Prompts
- What is a digital identity?
- How do personal versus professional approaches to digital identity affect social media use?
- How do digital identities converge in networked publics – what are the impacts and benefits?
Photo by Shahadat Rahman on Unsplash
This week, we talked mainly about Digital Identities. From our course material, a person’s digital identity can be defined as his/her footprint on the web, which is also the basis of his/her online presence as well. Everything that you post or share on the web in order to teach, reflect on, and/or showcase your profile by using digital tools for your own benefits is your digital identity. Also, it can be a kind of pre-interview for your employment as well because the thing that your post online might be seen by your potential employers as well. Therefore, it’s very important and necessary to manage digital identity.
Personal versus professional approaches to digital identity can affect the use of social media. In my opinion, different social media platforms will be used in different focuses; therefore, it will be valuable for people to know what the balance between personal and professional approaches to digital identity is clearly. For example, some social media tools, such as Instagram and Snapchat, focus more on personal presences; therefore, the kinds of online tools will be beneficial for users to share their own daily lives and experience in order to build their personal digital identity. Differently, other social media tools like LinkedIn and Zoom focus more on professional presences, which users can use them to share information in relation to their work and showcase their professional portfolios in order to build their professional digital identity.
As more and more social media tools have been used in our today’s digital world, it is becoming more and more difficult to separate our personal digital identities from professional digital identities. Most people use their real personal information in both personal and professional accounts because they think it will be much more convenient for them. However, when our digital identities are converging in networked publics, we need to pay more attention to their negative impacts as well. For example, the potential employers may look at their interviewees’ personal accounts in order to gain new perspectives of them from their daily lives. Therefore, inappropriate words on personal accounts may make them lose a job opportunity.
References
Eric, S. (2016). What is Digital Identity? YouTube. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0RryRbJza0&feature=youtu.be
Saira, J. Usman, M. & Rahila, Y. (2019). Digital Professional Identity: Dear Internet! Who am I? Retrieved from: http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=e60f682f-ad9f-4586-81b3-245d0488a035%40sdc-v-sessmgr03
Hi Chunlin,
thank you for your sharing. I agree with your opinion in the blog, we can use online tools to share and learn the experience of daily life and establish an environment of network trust.
Mike
Hello Mike,
Thank you for your reply.
Chunlin