The readings in this unit afforded us an opportunity to critically examine our digital presence and identity as they relate to several typologies, including the Resident/Visitor typology proposed by White and Le Cornu (2011), which was a response to the “Digital Native/Digital Immigrant” typology first introduced by Prensky (2001).
In examining the Resident/Visitor typology, we learn that one of the fundamental criticisms of Prensky’s (2001) Native/Immigrant typology is that Prensky asserts that a “native” grasp of technology is that it is predominantly an age-based “generational” trait, and not an acquired set of skills and values. (White & Le Cornu, 2011)
Instead of the binary Native/Immigrant model, which is couched in colonial language, White and Le Cornu instead propose a more fluid spectrum from Resident, who engages in online communities and environments, leaving behind traces of their digital identity, to Visitors, who use digital media more as tools, leaving behind little (or no) trace of their presence. (White & Le Cornu, 2011)
In examining my own digital media footprint, I feel that an additional dimension of Private/Public could be layered onto this, creating a three-dimensional matrix when mapped against Resident/Visitor typology and Personal/Institutional spaces and/or content.
My reasoning is that when considering that in online media and communities, we may in fact have several “publics” (boyd, 2010) or personas that may have an impact on whether our digital presence is tied to our personal life, our professional life, or our academic life. The Public/Private spectrum also affords us the possibility of having a completely self-contained persona that is an online presence not tied to the public or private individual, such as posting and engaging on Reddit under a pseudonym.
As such, my Digital Engagement Map is built out into 8 quadrants:
Resident | Personal | Public
Reddit: I engage regularly on Reddit, both posting and commenting, but I do so under a screen name that is not connected in any way to my “real life” presence. This persona allows for posting and commenting publicly on a wide range of subjects, without leaving traces that connect to my personal or professional lives. I consider this to be distinct from a “visitor” type of engagement, because I am engaging in a pseudo-anonymous way, with traces connected to an assumed digital identity, which is self-contained and shielded from my personal and professional life.
Facebook: Only parts of my Facebook identity fall into this quadrant, because I am careful about what I post and comment on in the public realm, for privacy, security, and data mining protection.
Resident | Institutional | Public
LinkedIn: This quadrant is almost exclusively occupied by my LinkedIn activities. I have begun posting articles of interest and engaging a bit more with the learning community on LinkedIn, as a way of supporting my current and future career goals. I consider LinkedIn to be a “business social network” and as such, my activity there is focused on career and professional subjects. I also consider the “public” aspect of LinkedIn to be more of a “walled garden,” as I do not believe much content on LinkedIn is available to the full “public” as an account is required to see most of it. So it is a “curated public” of business network connections of varying degrees.
This is also the space that my MALAT blog will occupy. Since that content is only in the formative stages, and the scope, scale, and reach of it are yet to be determined, I did not include that in the map just yet. (The map is a work in progress.)
Resident | Personal | Private
Facebook: I keep most of my content on Facebook fairly locked down to my family and friends, and as such is a curated space in terms of both content and audience. Occasionally, I will post and/or comment on something public, but that is rare. This is currently in flux and fluid, which is why Facebook is more of a “blob” on my map instead of a more clearly defined rectangular space.
Instagram: My personal Instagram account is private, though I do post a few times a year with another public account.
Resident | Institutional | Private
LMS activity: I include this as a general grouping, as it includes online engagement within the closed MALAT community, as well as my activity within the Learning Management Systems of my teaching institutions, in the form of posts and discussion forums within their respective LMS environments.
Visitor | Personal | Public
This is a tricky category. This is where I would include things like Wikipedia and Google searches. However, I choose to use DuckDuckGo for my search engine, as they are more privacy-focused. In the rare event that I use Google, I always make sure that I am not logged in to a Google account, to ensure that my search history is not attached to a user account. That said, Google and other properties still use tracking technologies (tracking by IP address, DNS fingerprinting, etc.) to compile composite user profiles, but I prefer to not make it easy for them.
Visitor | Institutional | Public
I chose to place my personal website into this quadrant. Although it contains detailed case studies about my work and history, it is more business than personal, and post comments are not enabled, so there is no personal footprint left behind here.
I also include Twitter here, because although I do have a Twitter account, I rarely use it. I am wary of the amount of time I could possibly spend there connecting, curating, commenting, and replying, which could potentially turn into a massive investment of time and energy, so I have chosen to keep my Twitter footprint to a minimum, and I primarily use it as a customer service outreach channel.
Visitor | Personal | Private
I would consider my personal email to fall into this category, as it is primarily a tactical communication channel, and compiling a composite image of my digital presence through my personal email activity would not produce much.
Visitor | Institutional | Private
Like my personal email, this is likely where my business/institutional/educational email resides. This is also be the quadrant where things like RRU Library searches are housed.
The Plan
Moving forward, these quadrants and the digital media groupings within them may evolve and change. Privacy and information security are important to me, and as such, I try to ensure that there are boundaries between my online “home” and the spaces where I work and learn.
Goals and Approach
As I progress through the MALAT program, I anticipate having much more to say and to share with both my classmates, with faculty members, and with the broader learning community.
The principal vehicle through which this will be accomplished will be through my MALAT blog posts. I hope to support my course-driven posts with supplementary posts on subject matter that is of interest to me, which may be more conversational in tone.
I will endeavour to build a broader audience for my work by sharing out to my communities on LinkedIn, to use these platforms as a platform generate interest and discussion, as well as share knowledge and passion for learning among my peers and my colleagues. I will consider other platforms and channels if there is real benefit to be gained by growing my audience in different directions.
Gaps and Challenges
Creating and growing an audience is not something I have a great deal of experience with. I have typically relied upon a more organic, “build it and they will come” approach to engagement, and exploring new ways (or at least new-to-me ways) of building an audience and engagement will be an area of knowledge growth.
While I recognize there is huge potential in using a platform such as Twitter to reach a very large potential audience, I do also recognize that it can become a fast-flowing conduit of conversation that can become difficult – and time-consuming – to manage. If I am unable to commit the time and energy into that level of engagement in order to fully realize the benefits of that platform or channel, then I may prefer to focus my efforts elsewhere. There are only so many hours out of the day I am prepared to use in the care and maintenance of my online presence, so must choose wisely.
Measuring Success
Overall, I would consider my digital presence a success if my posts through my chosen platforms and channels gain interest, generate discussion, and grow my audience among educators and learning communities.
The best measure of success will be finishing the MALAT program with the knowledge, skills, and resources, and network to be able to grow my career in new directions.
Hello Darren, Nice read and good flow, you mention or reference a number of things that I am unfamiliar with. I don’t have any experience with “Reddit” so have reserved my judgement, I am curious about your persona for Reddit, is this more to do with the platforms reputation or the content you engage with or maybe something else? I have played with personas a bit but have found it, in general difficult to manage. I am also curious about how you will be linking your MALAT WordPress blog into your LinkedIn. I would love to do this as well but I wonder if I need to add a disclaimer regarding my workplace bias as I wouldn’t want to discuss data and connections that would raise any question about the data’s integrity.
I really connected with your comment about privacy and information security and keeping those boundaries in place, this will be something that I hope to mostly control with settings and permissions and then keep a close eye on who my audience is. I do have a gap in my understanding of how much of what I do is sold, used, researched etc, and I am hoping the MALAT journey will be a critical step in understanding and exploring my own personal data ownership, and control.
Thanks for sharing, I will have to take a look at Reddit so I can join the conversations 😉
Hi Darren,
The format and descriptions you provided in each category worked really well and found it had great flow. I never thought of including pseudonyms as part of a digital presence, but I can see how that should be included based on your description. Do you find that using DuckDuckGo works just as well for searching as Google? I have not heard of this search engine but am intrigued by the security aspect you describe.
Maintaining privacy resonated with me as well. It is a tricky juggling act to have clear delineations between resident, visitor, public and private along with the Institutional aspect of having a digital footprint. I feel as though reading your post has helped make things more clear for me, thanks for that! Looking forward to reading some of your conversational posts. 🙂
Online personas have been a part of the social fabric of the Internet going back quite a way. I have not yet started to dig into the scholarly material on the subject yet. (I still feel like I’m trying to drink from a firehose of content with the first couple of weeks of required readings.)
DuckDuckGo is pretty good, and meets my needs about 95% of the time. I feel that not having to sift through “sponsored” search results and advertising gives me better quality results and takes less time to find what I need. In the rare instance that I do use Google, I use it “signed out” or in anonymous/incognito mode in my browser to keep the results “clean.”
I started on Reddit only a couple of years ago, as it seemed like a place where a lot of people were getting topical content. There are some interesting subject-matter driven communities, as well as more general places where people post and discuss news and events, ask questions, etc. It’s almost a general “forum for everything.”
I think the anonymous nature of Reddit has been there since its beginning. Users are prompted for a username when signing up, and that can be as cryptic or as revealing as one chooses to be, as that becomes your “identity” under which your posts and comments appear. This approach has a long history on the Internet, going back to IRC (Internet Relay Chat), the earliest “chat rooms” on the Internet.
The advantage is that you can post or comment freely on a wide range of subjects, in a casual and uncensored way (within the bounds of the rules of each sub-community). Moderation of posts and comments is also done at the local level. Someone with a wide range of interests can express themselves in a way that is comfortable to them, without things getting connected to their identity “in real life.”
This understandably can cut both ways, as the veil anonymity, while it can shield individuals from privacy breaches, can also embolden people to write things that may go against community standards.
I enjoyed reading your post. Taking the Resident/Visitor graph to the third dimension really worked well for me. I struggled with where to put many tools on my personal map during the first week of the program. Having that third dimension of public private would have helped me. You mentioned having public and private personas. I do everything with my real name on the internet, as I just want to make sure that if I post anything anywhere it sort of passes some strict internal (internal to my mind) filters. This of course makes my online persona perhaps too safe and boring. Do you find having a public professional and a different public personal persona a bit more freeing, giving you areas on the internet to express a different side of yourself?
I’m glad to hear that adding the third axis resonated with others as well. I feel like the Resident/Visitor model needs that extra layer to allow for curated spaces and curated content. One of my students actually told me about Spline, the tool I used to create the 3D model. If you click through, you can actually spin it around to see the interrelationships more clearly. I couldn’t embed the 3D model directly into my blog post without a WordPress plugin that isn’t available to us.
I have gone through alternating stages of using online personas, user names, or pseudonyms, and at other times wanting to present my “authentic” self only. But that was largely in the days before social media, algorithms, tracking, Cambridge Analytica, digital fingerprinting, and the world’s largest advertising company providing so many digital tools for “free.”
For the most part, I try to keep my public footprint as minimal as possible, and generally use a pseudonym on places like Reddit, where there are no privacy or audience controls on what gets posted or commented on. It’s all wide open.
So I consider myself to be largely “resident, but private.” There are traces, but they live within walled communities, or a curated audience. The different “publics” that danah boyd wrote about.
This does afford me the ability to post and comment on a wide range of subject matter that would allow data miners to create too detailed of a composite profile based on my posting patterns. It’s a form of “freedom,” but one born out of a sense of caution.
Hi Darren,
I also keep an persona for certain sites like Reddit and Twitter that is not connected to my personal identity. I find that with the open nature of these spaces and open flow of ideas, context can often be misconstrued, and because I am so private I would not want a misunderstanding of a personal opinion without context to cause conflict between my home and professional personas.
I say home and professional personas intentionally because I don’t just believe that we have personas online, but also in the real world as well. I am my true self when I am alone in my personal environment. I am a version of myself when at home with my family, and as much as I love them and feel safe with them, I don’t tell them all my thoughts and do withhold saying certain things to take their needs into consideration. I feel this is taking on my persona of wife and/or mother. Yet still at work I take on a professional persona that is a different me than I would be at home with my family. All of these personas are me, but at different times, with different people, in different environments certain elements of my true self are suppressed or heightened depending on which I feel is needed at that time.
I agree with you on all of this, Rebecca. We all have personas that we adopt in each of the communities and environments we live, work, and play in. I also don’t consider any of them are any less “authentic” than the other. They represent different aspects of our lives and our personalities, and I believe boundaries are a healthy thing to maintain.
In 2014, I became pretty much un-Google-able when a police officer with the same name as me shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Because I own the domain name darrenwilson.com, i was able to see the huge spike in traffic to my site, and the top search engine queries that led people there, which included searches like “Darren Wilson home address.” That spooked me just a little, and gave me very good reason to protect my online privacy more than I had been.
Darren, that sounds terrifying, when my children were younger, they took an online safety course and I learned how easy it is to detect ones location with only a few hints. These hints can be landmarks in pictures, even kids soccer uniforms often have local sponsors and can help pinpoint a location. Scary, I never considered how sharing a name could potentially come with such negative reactions. I’d love to know how you currently manage your privacy, such as through the content or through privacy settings? Right now I seem to have quite high privacy settings, I think this has more to do with confidence than content, but not sure. Hope you didn’t have any other scares. Nicole