Month: September 2020

Questions about digital identity

What is a digital identity?

To better understand the concept of digital identity, we can look back on the idea of identity. There are two functions of identity. On one side, it tells who we are, and on the other side, it provides us accesses to social services. It’s the same with our digital identity.

Digital identity is one’s online presence, including whatever one posts as well as how one interacts with others. One’s digital identity reveals one’s personal traits, tastes, favorites, and uniqueness. What’s more, one’s digital identity nowadays could serve as the threshold for one to enjoy digital services, such as financial services. One without digital bank account or mobile payment is actually denied many economic opportunities.

How do personal versus professional approaches to digital identity affect social media use?

Our personal digital identities determine what social media platforms we prefer, how we engage ourselves in the social media, and what kind of groups we take part in to get a sense of belonging. Think how social media serves us. We use social media to entertain, to gather information, to interact with others, and during all the process we are actually consciously or unconsciously looking for a sense of community. Both our comments online and participation in certain groups confirm our ideal personal identity.

Our professional approaches to digital identity affect social media use by two ways. On one aspect, professional requirements may suppress our personal identity and force us to take on uniform professional identity. What our jobs want us to present ourselves online may conflict with who we truly are. In this case, we have few alternatives but to choose to perform what the bosses want or what the work ethics require. On the other aspect, our professional skills direct us how to perceive and use social media. If one treats social media as a huge, open resource pool where he/she can gain benefits from then she/he may hold a positive attitude towards social media interactions. Besides, if one is equipped with professional skills, such as peer learning and team working, he/she could harvest much from social media interaction and could have more active participation.

How do digital identities converge in networked publics—what are the impacts and/or benefits?

It’s no doubt that with the pervasion of internet, anyone with digital access leaves personal digital identity and personal information in networked publics. The question is what are the pros and cons.

The advantages of digital identity include strengthening of our persona, establishment of our personal learning networks and entrance to digital economic and societal services. In order to obtain the imaginary sense of community we need to repress our real selves and make performance of the right sort of identity. Nevertheless,  professional performance online do promote our career development and leave others good impressions. We can take advantage of our digital identity to present others what they need or want. Besides, digital identities help build personal learning networks. Once we intend to learn something new, we could easily access to some related community online and learn from others their experience and gain useful resources. Last but not least, digital identities currently represent green lights to many kinds of services that could facilitate one to develop and boost. With digital identities, customers can purchase online efficiently, and entrepreneurs can apply for loans, and government could streamline its service procedures.

The problems of digital identity are obvious, such as, how could our identity and information be protected and prevented from being misused. For example, Facebook is free of charge to its users, however, the users themselves are indeed goods to be exchanged with advertisers by the corporation for profits. In addition, our digital records are consistent and always traceable. Our activities on Facebook and twitter witness how we grew and developed. As a result, our digital presence could be an effective and efficient tool for surveillance. Another risk is that since the self-learning algorithm is able to analyze our prefers and then feed us exactly what we may like. We will probably indulge ourselves into a closed bubble where we are surrounded with like-minded people, leading to the strengthening of  our possible prejudices and ideologies.

References

• Jawed, S., Mahboob, U., & Yasmeen, R. (2019). Digital professional identity: Dear Internet! Who am I Retrieved September 25, 2020, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31512590
• Eric, S. (2016). What is Digital Identity? Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0RryRbJza0&feature=youtu.be
• Saira, J. Usman, M., & Rahila, Y. (2019). Digital Professional Identity: Dear Internet! Who am I? Retrieved from: http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=e60f682f-ad9f-4586-81b3-245d0488a035%40sdc-v-sessmgr03
• Karl, S. (2015). Identity-Making and Social Media. Retrieved from: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137405876_6

Questions about PLN

1. What does it mean to network using social media?
Network is not new, but technology is. Networking means intentionally build relations with people from whom we can get useful information and reliable resources. Social media represents an effective and convenient approach to network. It allows people to link to as many people as possible beyond the barriers of time and place, and to get access to various sources of information. With good use, such networks could serve as a unique tool for personal learning.

2. How do people learn and engage using mediated platforms?
Personal learning network means learning through technology. We learn from our networks and, mediated platforms make the process much easier. Therefore, the first thing to do is to build, maintain, and activate one’s interpersonal relations using mediated platforms. It matters that what kind of people should we intentionally build relations with. The answer is professionals who have relevant knowledge and background about your work and could help you with your future career development. Along with getting professional advice, people can also engage in active discussions to gain diverse perspectives, expanding our thinking. What’s more, mediated platforms make it possible to take part in virtual workshops and conferences.

3. How are we motivated to participate in networked publics?
There are both internal and external motivations that we should participate in networked publics. From the perspective of the working environment, the rapid advancement of technology may soon replace the jobs of some people and climate change may call for a bunch of new jobs concerning sustainable resources. In this way, people have to improve themselves by learning new things. But how? What university and textbooks provide us is limited and to some extent, out of date. To gain new and practical knowledge one has to rely on personal learning networks.

As to internal reasons, participating in networked publics gives access to more opportunities and easier solutions. To know some specific skills or knowledge pales in comparison with learning how to use one’s personal network and gain more useful information from different channels. Our personal learning ability is always limited compared with the combined power of the whole network. What you yourself are exploring at the moment might already have a professional answer within your network. Instead of spending hours digging by yourself, why not to find out the possible informed person and ask for advice, which can be more efficient and effective. Our networks could serve as our weapons, our tools to help us gain an advantage over others.

4. What are the risks and rewards of public communications?
There are both risks and rewards of public communications. From an individual perspective, public communications could serve as information pathways, promoting people’s professional development. From the perspective of organizations, they can build ties with possible partners which may help with future innovation and cooperation.

While connecting with others raises our awareness and expand our thinking, it may also increase the risks of revealing our privacy. Nowadays our privacy is increasingly networked. We may unconsciously expose our private information during public communications which then may be analyzed and capitalized by machine learning algorithms to predict our habits. Another possibility is that we might be exposed by our networks either for social or locational reasons without permission. Any attempt of controlling such a phenomenon may fail because privacy protection is not enough to prevent us from public communications and the data online is more persistent and replicable. What we can do is to dominate the interpretation of information and solve the problem by viewing networks as a whole.

Thank you for reading!