Create, Cultivate, and Reflect on your Digital Presence
Assignment 1 Part 2
Atkins and Murphy (1994) provided a model of reflection, which I found useful for writing this paper and decided to follow their 4 stages of reflective practice.
Stage 1:Awareness of uncomfortable feelings.
While cultivating my digital identity and digital presence I realized that on my Youtube channel I focus too much on the knowledge I’m trying to share in to avoid being known. My channel is educational, therefore in most videos, I explain various psychological theories and use them to analyze real-life situations. Yet you won’t see me talking, just hear and you won’t hear much about why this is important to me or how it applies to my life. Hiding behind the material helps me deal with the discomfort of being seen or known. Being seen and known makes me uncomfortable and yet I yearn it. It’s not a mystery why, I have a highly critical father who never finds anything positive to say to me and never misses an opportunity to point out my flaws. It’s bad enough that I project my critical father onto everyone, which makes me feel nervous before anyone can provide any feedback, but I also internalized my father. I always criticize myself harsher and quicker than anyone can do. The negative father complex (Nix, 2011), as well as defence mechanisms developed around it, are hindering my digital identity and digital presence. It became even more evident to me after unit 5 reflection activity. I recorded a quick and generic video of me not saying anything interesting or in-depth about my plan and experience following it. Not thinking much of it, I posted it on my blog and moved on to check out videos of other fellow students. They were much longer, much more interesting and detailed, personal and authentic. Everything I strive to be and do, yet I don’t. Why did I put out such a lazy and boring video? I felt uncomfortable talking about myself without anyone asking. And if someone does ask, I find it hard to believe it’s not just them being polite. Does anyone care about what I have to say? My father didn’t, so I learned to keep it to myself. I learned to stop caring about my own experience. Why should people care anyway? Why should anyone in the world care? My father, whom i loved very much and idealized as child, was my whole world, his personality was bigger than a world. And this world was not interested in me, so whenever I am asked to be interested in my experience and share it, I feel uncomfortable and I shut down. I run away from it like a plague to avoid feeling uncomfortable. It is one of the reasons why I like being a counsellor and an educator. I can focus on giving people what they need instead of talking about myself.
I also find it difficult to spend time on something I don’t find interesting. Curiosity is my main drive. I feel uncomfortable following a routine or doing what needs to be done because it takes away my time and energy from what I am passionate about. Cultivating my digital identity and digital presence involves content marketing and personal marketing, which feels like something I need to do rather than what I want to do.
Stage 2: Examination of components of the situation and exploration of alternative actions.
What drives the desire to have a digital identity? Ertzscheid suggested that there is a connection to Maslow’s pyramid of needs (2016). I attempt to satisfy the need for self-esteem and self-actualization through my digital presence. As I look back on my initial plan to develop my digital identity and digital presence, I realize now that I look for a confident, skilful and guiding hand to satisfy my need for self-esteem and self-actualization. In my plan, I expressed a desire for outsourcing to fill gaps in my skills and knowledge. I keep searching for a father figure, who will believe in me and help me come out of my shell so that I can be seen and known. So far, my efforts produced no results. People, that I approached to become my partner, saw no benefit for themselves. An alternative would be to hire, as I mentioned in my initial plan, a personal brand developer. Why haven’t I done it yet? I don’t believe that my digital presence is significant enough, there is not much to develop and my Youtube channel only has about 50 videos. I plan to rely mostly on Youtube in building digital presence because “on average, videos led to better learning outcomes compared with other methods”(Noetel et al., 2020). I don’t enjoy blogging, therefore I’m not going to keep an active blog outside of MALAT program, but I will put up all my writing on a WordPress website mostly to have a point of reference. I already purchased a domain name and I am looking for an affordable hosting service.
I am at the crossroads when it comes to my professional life. I just quit my job because I don’t enjoy trying to help people that are resistant to help. As I mentioned in a previous assignment, in social services relationships with care providers are rarely sought out and usually resisted (Rooney & Mirick, 2018). Lack of choice plays a major role in resistance (Ritchie, 1986). Based on this evidence and my experience, I do not ever wish to work again as a counsellor for a non-profit organization. I still enjoy being a counsellor and I like playing the role of an educator, how do I combine both into one? Over the next 3 months, I will be travelling with my family in the RV all over Canada and trying to find an answer to that question. These aspects of my personal and professional life are already impacting my decisions when it comes to content creation. At the moment, I am seeking out volunteers willing to be anonymously interviewed about their personal lives for financial compensation. These interviews will be used for testing a new personality assessment that I have developed. I will be sharing the results and the method itself on my Youtube channel because of its relevance to determining personality compatibility in relationships. I have already conducted a few interviews, which is a very similar process to counselling sessions I am used to, except the participants are willing and fully engaging. And I have already started analyzing the material and writing content for the future podcast series on my Youtube channel. So far it feels like an exciting fusion of counselling and educating roles, but is there a demand for this product in real life?
Stage 3: Summary of outcomes of reflection or learnings.
One of the main revelations has been so far is that digital identity is not the same as personal identity (Schryver, 2013). Personal identity can be a by-product of just being, it requires no extra effort if I don’t wish to put in the extra effort. Digital identity is something to be constructed and maintained, as a reputation (Ertzscheid, 2016). Resident-visitor typology (White and LeCornu, 2011) helped me understand my digital presence. And making a plan for cultivating a digital presence and digital identity helped me identify gaps in knowledge and skills, as well as create a long-term vision. I realized that I focus too much on creating content because i enjoy it and don’t spend enough time on adding a personal narrative to it, for the reasons explained in stage one. I still believe it would be helpful to have someone help me build a personal brand, but it might be too early. For now, I will put more energy into weaving a personal narrative in my content. I want people to care. The debate activity helped me realize that sifting through a ton of information that I care little about can be exhausting. If I was more personally connected to the subject or people debating the subject, I’d want to keep coming back to it. That’s what I want from my audience, but I need to give them a reason to care. How do I do achieve that? I need to focus more on emotional expression and sharing personal meaning. What educational format would be more appropriate for it? After reading a theory of transactional distance (Dron & Anderson, 2014), I realized that I prefer a low structure, high dialogue format, which is more suitable for informal educational seminars.
Stage 4: Action resulting from reflection.
I am going to continue creating more content! Right now I am interviewing more volunteers and analyzing our conversations. When I am done with this project, along with previously created content, it will be uploaded to a personal WordPress website with a fancy custom made theme. When it reaches critical mass, let’s say 100 videos on Youtube and about the same number of articles on my site, I will join several online communities, be it Facebook or forums, and start actively engaging in discussions where I can refer to my content.
I am also looking at various personal brand developers to shortlist and ask for advice, as soon as I hit above-mentioned numbers. Meanwhile, I am working on overcoming my psychological issues and hopefully, it will result in a rise of self-confidence and a decrease of self-criticism.
References
Atkins, S. and Murphy, K. (1994). Reflective Practice. Nursing Standard, 8(39) 49-56.
Dron, J, & Andreson, T. (2014). Teaching Crowds. Athabasca University Press.
Ritchie, M. H. (1986). Counseling the Involuntary Client. Journal of Counseling & Development, 64(8), 516–518. doi: 10.1002/j.1556-6676.1986.tb01186.x
Ertzscheid, O. (2016). What is digital identity? Issues, tools, methodologies. Marseille: Open Edition Press. doi:10.4000/books.oep.1235
Nix, D. C. (2011, April 12). The Negative Father Complex. Retrieved June 10, 2020, from https://www.don-nix.com/the-negative-father-complex-2/
Noetel, M., Griffith, S., Delaney, O., Sanders, T., Parker, P., del Pozo Cruz, B., & Lonsdale, C. (2020, May 18). Are you better on YouTube? A systematic review of the effects of video on learning in higher education. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/kynez
Ritchie, M. H. (1986). Counseling the Involuntary Client. Journal of Counseling & Development, 64(8), 516–518. doi: 10.1002/j.1556-6676.1986.tb01186.x
Rooney, R. H., & Mirick, R. (2018). Strategies for work with involuntary clients. Retrieved from https://books.google.ca/
Schryver, K. (2013, February 5). Who are you online? Considering issues of web identity. The New York Times blogs. Alternate link to the The NYT blogs site.
White, D. S., & LeCornu, A. (2011). Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9)