Digital Presence & Identity – Moving Forward

Before starting the MALAT program, I had never stopped and thought about my digital presence and identity. While like many people I use social media and have a presence online, they were all just means to serve an end. Whether it be a web search to find an answer or Facebook to reconnect with old friends, most of my interactions with online applications have been brief and my resident-visitor typology map reflects that. I have always thought of myself as a shyer and private person and therefore I’ve never really drawn attention to myself, online or otherwise. My Facebook while private, has had very few posts attributed to me. One could say that this lack of digital presence is my online identity. Being an introvert isn’t intrinsically a bad thing and I wouldn’t want my digital presence and identity to represent someone that is not me.

Jenkins (2009) notes 4 types of participatory culture: 1) Affiliations, 2) Expressions, 3) Collaborative Problem Solving, and 4) Circulations. I see myself taking part in 2 of them, namely affiliations and collaborative problem solving. I believe they go hand-in-hand since the more affiliations that I’m a part of, the more opportunities that I will have in working collaboratively to solve a problem.

This is all in the professional sense as I feel my digital presence in that quadrant is more lacking. Also, I’m more self-aware of this space as it is intended to be public. Boyd (2010) talks about the persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability of what you put in a ‘networked public’, which is a public networked digital space. These factors should make one think twice about anything they upload online. ‘Persistence’ means anything that is put up will stay there. Also if your network is vast, the content is also scalable to reach a wider audience than you intend. In today’s day and age, everyone searches everything from nuclear superpowers to their own name. I have papers uploaded to Academia.edu and hope to refine my presence there a little more. Making connections with researchers is also part of my plan. My LinkedIn could do with some spring cleaning as well.

I do have reservations about the ‘invisible audiences’ that are free to come and go on my webpage (Boyd, 2010). Because you don’t know who may view your page, it can be difficult to tailor according to your audience. I have always learned to write to your audience as different people may interpret things differently. This can be challenging when anyone could be your audience (or no one).

In the end, I think the questions that Schryver (2013) postulates are very important in terms of how I will approach digital identity: “Are you proud of your digital presence? Will you be proud of it in ten years? Are there things that are untrue or pertain someone with the same name? What can you do about that?”. As I progress in this program, these will be some of the questions that I will keep in the back of my mind as I make my posts and leave my digital footprint.

Boyd, D. (2011). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A Networked Self (pp. 39–58). New York, NY: Rutledge.

Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. MIT Press.

Schryver, K. (2013, February 5). Who are you online? Considering issues of web identity. The New York Times.