Public PLN – Balancing PLN and public discourse
1.How do notable individuals use social media?
From Sophie’s sharing, we can learn how notable individuals use social media. Sophie is a news anchor, and she is active on her social media. She has made a separation between her professional presence online and her personal one. When it comes to the professional field she turns to the platform of Twitter where she can post her perspective towards social issues, follow people she is interested in and learn from them as well as scroll over others’ comments. Twitter is where she builds her professional PLN, which promotes her career development. Besides, she also creates a personal PLN on Instagram where she can post the photos of her life, showing others her facet of being accessible.
2.What are the benefits of being in the public eye and having a PLN? (career development in the public eye)
During the interview, Sophie has mentioned the benefits of being in the public eye. The online presence of anchors allows the public to know more about their profession, to understand their situations and impediments, and thus show more sympathy and recognition. Besides, Sophie talked about how her PLN helped her when she entered the field. She contacted some journalist predecessors, asking them for advice and recommending herself, which set a good foundation for her career development. What’s more, being in the public eye enables Sophie to get real-time feedback towards her performance. Although these comments are mixed with both compliments and criticism, she could reflect on them and learn from them.
3.Building community with online tools provided by the employer can be limiting, what are the perceived restrictions and benefits of having social media directly associated with employment? (verified accounts because of employment, accounts that are professional versus personal, hybrid accounts)
There is no doubt social media serves a convenient tool of connecting with others, therefore, when it marries work it facilitates communication, cooperation and supervision. Such a social media platform can improve working efficiency dramatically. However, its upside can also turn into its downside. With such an online tool, any online movement and performance of the employees could be tracked and recorded precisely by data. To meet the demands of employers, employees may have to create their professional persona. Besides, the feature of “instant messaging” makes it possible to blur the borders of one’s professional life and personal life, keeping one in standby mode all the time around the clock.
4. Delivering information in a connected society requires verifiable resources, how does one build a PLN that can be consistently relied on?
According to Martin Hirst, two main factors account for the occurrence of fake news. One is economic factor and the other is reckless journalists. This could inspire us on how to build a reliable PLN. We can choose to follow individuals or information channels that are not manipulated by capital participation. Only when the sources subject to no powerful persons or institutions could they stick to the truthfulness of their information. In addition, we can make a judgement towards the credibility of the sources from several aspects, for example, whether the person we follow checks the information beforehand or not and whether he/she resorts to logical thinking rather than the intuitive one. Last but not least, we ourselves should also develop social media literacy, which means we should always check the facts before we spread the information.(Hirst 54)
5. How do those, who are veteran storytellers, minimize risk in sharing misinformation?
To minimize risk in sharing misinformation, storytellers must capitalize on search engines or their PLN to verify the truthfulness of the information. Besides, they’d better be clear about their own belief systems or their ideology because that helps them to bring no personal bias when sharing information. What’s more, the storytellers should pay attention to their rhetoric and they are supposed to employ logical thinking instead of emotional manipulation. (Hirst 54)
Works cited
Hirst, Martin. Navigating Social Journalism: A Handbook for Media Literacy and Citizen Journalism. 1st ed., Routledge, 2018.
Hi! You offered such an interesting perspective when you suggested storytellers can reduce sharing false information by being “clear about their own belief systems or their ideology because that helps them to bring no personal bias when sharing information”. I hadn’t thought about that stance before. I find at times my own personal bias comes out- i often have to be mindful of my ego to combat that.