Students “must be effective architects, narrators, curators, and inhabitants of their own digital lives” (Campbell, 2009, p. 59). Royal Roads has given me this opportunity by giving me a blog that I can write in during my program and take with me when I am done. The course I am completing now has challenged me to increase my public presence on social media. My overall goal and purpose for cultivating my digital presence and identity is to connect with my friends, family, and peers by sharing pieces of information about my life and interests on social media platforms. I also want to be able to ask questions and obtain information from my peers.
I will connect with others, and share and obtain information, by posting regularly on Facebook (private account) and liking and commenting on other people’s posts; posting regularly on LinkedIn (public account) and liking and commenting on other people’s posts when appropriate, and looking for more people in my field to connect with on that website; reading and contributing on the 2022 MALAT cohort Slack group; conversing with others on Line messenger; consuming information and asking questions on Discord; creating shared documents in Google Docs and discussing them over Zoom; and writing blog posts on WordPress and commenting on my cohort’s blogs.
I am used to working with social media, so I don’t think I have many knowledge or skills gaps. I plan to be cautious when posting publicly on LinkedIn because according to boyd (2010), characteristics of networked publics are persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability. I want to make sure I present a positive digital identity and presence to the public.
The measures of success for this project will mainly be that I post, like, comment, and converse consistently. I will look at the number of connections I add on LinkedIn, and I will track the number of likes and impressions on my posts to see what kinds of content are the most popular.
I look forward to the results of this experiment.
References
boyd, D. (2010). Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (pp. 39–58). New York, NY: Routledge.
Campbell, G. (2009). A Personal Cyberinfrastructure. Educause Review, 44(5), 58–59.
Great read Heather. I liked your thoughts about and words of caution around Boyd’s (2010) characteristics of networked publics being persistent, replicable and searchable. A question I have is how you intend to use LinkedIn. I have a LinkedIn account, but I don’t feel I use it effectively, so I am wondering if you have any ideas of how best to use LinkedIn to improve our digital presence?
I think just posting and commenting and liking on LinkedIn is enough. You could set an intention on what kind of posts you want to create and engage with. I think building a LinkedIn presence takes time because you don’t want to oversaturate your feed, either.
Thanks for sharing Heather. I also found Boyd’s (2010) argument around the affordances of persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability to be very thought-provoking. These were challenges I had already deliberated about my social media presence, but the way it was presented gave me new considerations. Would you say you have any gaps in other technologies that we may be introduced to that could be considered networked publics that are not social media? Like the WordPress blog for example or similar?
Hi Rebecca, I can’t think of anything I have a gap in, but it is probably a case of I don’t know what I don’t know.