As part of growing my digital presence (see post from April 30, 2019), I will post a casual post like this every week.  The plan behind these posts is to take what I am learning and apply it to my life as I experience events that relate to the MALAT program.

This week’s post comes from a conversation I had at Heritage Park yesterday as I was working my volunteer shift.  A co-worker and I were talking about how communications have changed between when newspapers were new to now when most of our communications are digital.  My co-worker is young and easily fits into the digital native group, but he chooses to keep his digital presence very low.  He has three social media accounts: a blog, an Instagram account, and Facebook Messenger).  He uses Facebook Messenger without having a Facebook account, he keeps his blog so hidden that someone has yet to find it, and he has fewer than five followers on Instagram.  He explained that he does this because he wants to choose how people see what he does.  This got me thinking about the amount of information available online and who can see that information.  Information’s misuse can happen if it lands in the possession of the wrong person regardless of the medium used to distribute the information.  Being careful online is common-knowledge now, and I suspect that is where his desire to choose who sees the content he posts.  This conversation got me wondering if he was missing something by not interacting online.  He has taken great effort to structure the tools to his needs, but I wonder if that restricts his learning in a way that he had not considered.

The readings throughout this course have had one constant theme; online publics change and grow with each person and each posting.  Online communities, groups, networks, etc., come from individuals’ experiences both on- and off-line and the only way to encourage that is to dive in the open and see what happens.

Before I began the MALAT program, I knew that some people where more comfortable using the computer and venturing online than others.  I am only a few weeks into the program and I have learned that there are visitors and residents, digital natives and immigrants (White & Le Cornu, 2011), and environments that work for each group and that each group does not have hard borders, meaning that one can move between the groups with ease.  Hargittai and Walejko note, “some people may only turn to digital media on occasion and for only a few activities, others may make it an integral part of their lives” (Hargittai & Walejko, 2008, p. 240), recently I experienced a blending of the groups in a surprising way.  I was telling a colleague that I was encouraging my dad to adopt an elderly cat by sending him photos and text messages in the voice of the cat.  As I was sending more messages, my dad was starting to give-in to the idea of bringing home the cat.  After I told the entire story, my colleague responded with comments like “yes, I saw that!  Your poor dad did not have a chance!”, which, if I had sent the messages in an open platform (i.e. social media), her response would have been accurate; however, each message was a text and only my dad and I saw them.  After reading articles about digital presences, I believe that my colleague is an online resident which caused her to default to the thought that, since we are connected on social media, she had witnessed the exchange regarding adopting the cat, when she was, actually, hearing about it for the first time in that moment.

This experience made me realize that while we are able to turn to a digital environment to interact with others, it is important to realize that not all exchanges are visible to our entire network and when we react to something, it is important to know where we fit in the original exchange.  The conversation allowed me to recognize when someone is more of a resident online than I am; which, is something that I was unaware of prior to being in this program.

References

Hargittai, E. & Walejko, G. (2008) The Participation Divide: Content creation and sharing in the digital age, Information, Communication & Society, 11:2, 239-256, DOI: 10.1080/13691180801946150

White, D., & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). doi:https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v16i9.3171

Without community, we would not have somewhere to exchange ideas about what we are working on or what we are learning.  Learning happens every day, and while it is, primarily, an individualized activity, the connections between learning and life happens in communities as stated by Dron and Anderson, “knowledge is information that has been contextualized, made relevant, and owned” Dron & Anderson, 2014, p. 16).  Until we can take the information we have received and work with it in a community, it cannot truly become knowledge (Dron & Anderson, 2016).  This idea resonated with me in regards to my plan to grow my digital presence.  I have always been a hands-on learner and building a digital presence will not be different.

Overall, the readings helped me realize there are different groups, communities, and collectives available to help grow my digital presence.  When I wrote my original plan, I was thinking I had to build my presence on social media, and now I want to explore other areas where I can join topic related communities.  By creating my blog, I have starting to create a community and now in order to follow through with my plan; it is now time to share it with my network.  Johnson (as cited in vanOostveen, DiGiuseppe, Barber, Blayone, & Childs) states “…reality, including virtual reality, is something that is created, rather than discovered” (Johnson as cited in vanOostveen, DiGiuseppe, Barber, Blayone, & Childs, 2016, para. 6), I think my digital presence will be a combination of what I create and what I discover; I cannot create an entire reality of my own – there is not enough learning in that.  Sharing knowledge is how it gets stronger (Dron & Anderson, 2014), these readings have made me what to go out and share the knowledge!

References

Blayone, Todd & van Oostveen, Roland & Barber, Wendy & DiGiuseppe, Maurice & Childs, Elizabeth. (2016). Developing Learning Communities in Fully Online Spaces: Positioning the Fully Online Learning Community Model. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312087765_Developing_Learning_Communities_in_Fully_Online_Spaces_Positioning_the_Fully_Online_Learning_Community_Model

Dron, J, & Anderson, T. (2014). Teaching Crowds. doi:10.15215/aupress/9781927356807.01

As my digital footprint is small, so is my network; “there are more networked devices than people in the world” (Anderson, Dron, 2014, p. 3), I fit into this category.  I have several devices that connect to digital networks, but I am not a member of many of them.  Although my network is small, it does what I need it to do.

Breaking Down my Network

Naturally, I am at the center of my network, which connects to six hubs: school, work, friends, family, Facebook, and Linked-In, with school and work having sub-categories.  I split work and school further since they each have a large role in my network.  I included more than my digital network since I believe that a network comes from many connections.  In each of these hubs, there are people with whom I share a connection.  In many cases, these relationships are ones where we help each other.  The lines that attach the network do not have directions (i.e. arrows) because it is a flexible and the connections go both ways, which helps to build a stronger network.  Danah Boyd said, “physical structures are a collection of atoms while digital structures are built out of bits” (Boyd, 2011, para. 11), my network resides using both physical structures and bits.

References

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.

Dron, J, & Anderson, T. (2014). Teaching Crowds. Athabasca University Press. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120235