Digital Visitor and Resident Map
The concept of a digital visitor and resident was new to me prior to coming across past week’s assigned readings.
I really enjoy the alternative that this presents to the terms “digital native” and “digital immigrants”. I have never been comfortable with either term. I usually have associated these terms with ageism, bias, and making sweeping generalizations about a person’s participation, fluency and skill with technology, just based on age. I have always found this to be a very superficial and inaccurate portrayal of capacity to learn and grow.
My map is largely modelled after the one that Dave White creates in his video. On the top left quadrant I have listed a number of social media platforms in which I consider myself a visitor, mainly for personal use. The bottom right is where I list platforms that I almost exclusively use for work, and they are communities where I create, share, and network with others. I have a large, rectangular space that occupies both personal and institutional “residency” where I have placed LinkedIn. In the last few years, LinkedIn for me has been a space where I have been creating and sharing content, but not all of it has to do with my ‘day job’. I have been sharing reflections about leadership, parenting, trauma at work, and the effects of the pandemic on relationships. It’s been the closest thing to a regular blog that I have capacity to contribute to, and I’ve enjoyed seeing the responses my posts have garnered from people I am not even first degree connections with.
Where do you visit, and where are you a resident?
Interesting thoughts, Tracy. Thx!
For everyone – Do you find that you have different personas that manifest in your various online “homes”? Is your digital presence/identity different when you are a resident vs a visitor – or otherwise?
As I say to my nieces and nephews, everything you post on the internet can be found forever! So, I do apply this lens when thinking about what to post, and to which platforms and networks. In the last four years, I’ve rarely created content for posting to social media sites – with the outlier being LinkedIn. So I would say my presence and identity on LinkedIn is definitely more like “business lunch networking Tracy”. It’s the network where people would get to know me as a post-secondary instructor and a digital engagement strategist first.
Hi Russ and Tracy. These questions resonate with me at the moment. Russ, to quote a fellow student, I’m a lurker on all social media platforms and use them primarily to see what everyone is up to. As we have been reflecting on our presence, I realize that I take and don’t give back. When I post or contribute professionally, I contribute to content and ideas around our next campaigns, but it’s mainly my partner that posts on our business profiles. I’d like that to shift.
Tracy, it seems that you have found a digital space where you have been able to share and contribute your knowledge with others and have created a community. As part of my next steps in creating a digital presence, LinkedIn is the platform I’d like to focus on. What do you think it is about LinkedIn and those that engage and contribute to the platform that has allowed you to share and cultivate a community. How do you find it differs from other social media platforms?
In the last four years, I have found social media platforms to be less safe and less inclusive places to be. Even though I work in digital engagement, my personal use of social media has really dipped. But I have found that LinkedIn is a place where I feel the community is more legitimate, less nefarious, and is actually there to read my content because of an interest in common professional topics and ideas. In other words, I don’t fear being trolled by people on LinkedIn, or being called a racial slur, etc. etc. I’m far too much of an introvert to be on Tik Tok, but LinkedIn allows me to share thoughts and ideas and concepts that don’t make me feel as ‘exposed.’
Very cool map Tracy! I’m also interested to hear how you create content for LinkedIn. Do you create posts from scratch, or do you post articles? Creating articles or even videos for LinkedIn is something I would like to do more of in the next couple of years to extend my influence, so I’m interested to hear more about your experience.
Hi, Andrea. My posts to LinkedIn are a mix of curated content (content that I didn’t create but whose ideas or concepts I find interesting and worth sharing); and original content. I have done a series of partnerships with a software company who asked me to create long-form content about topics such as employee communication, engagement, communicating with deskless workers, etc, and these were a series of blog posts and videos that I created in partnership with that company. I also write a lot from whatever topics are really resonating with me that are related to leadership, management, inclusivity, being a working parent. I have received very positive feedback and analytics about these posts, which tells me that a lot of people really resonate with the same experiences.
Tracy, what is Mural?
Hi, Christopher. Mural is a visual collaboration tool. It is great for visualizing diagrams for meetings, lists, road maps, or anything that you want to create that would be more effective with a visual prompt. It integrates with other collaboration tools like Jira, too, which is brilliant if you want to create a task right form within the diagram itself.