Community Contribution #1
Before thinking about the literal term for digital identity, I’d say I mostly use or think about social media as something completely seperate from anything to do with my current/future professional life. While I know it’s incredibly common nowadays for social media to be used as a tool that can promote yourself, I personally have not used social media for anything other than my own enjoyment. The closest thing I’ve gotten to using social media for a professional identity was when we were required to create LinkedIn accounts as a co-op requirement in third year HINF, but even that was used for about 15 minutes total. With all of that being said, the more I think about it, the more I realize that almost everything we do online does contribute in some way to how other people see us, professionaly or personally. So to me, digital identity is another version of ourselves that we choose to exist online for others to see.
One of the more interesting aspects of digital identity to me is how we seperate professionl and personal use, or how the platform we use can change the way we behave. For example, I mainly use twitter and instagram in my personal life, and on instagram I haven’t posted in years but am on there once or twice a day to see what others are up to. While on twitter, I often comment or “retweet” things, and interact with others way more. If I compare this to something like LinkedIn, I would obviously be much more cautious with what I post or interact with because I know the profile of myself on that platform is representing me in a different light. It’s interesting that even though all three platforms represent me online, they all hold a different persona of who I am and how I act.
This also shows how our personal and profession identities can start to overlap. Even if I consider Twitter or Instagram to be a completely personal profile, that doesn’t mean those accounts couldn’t be seen by a future employer or coworker. This connects to the idea of Digital Professional Identity (DPI), which explains how our profesionnal identity is influenced by both how we see ourselves and how others percieve us through online interactions (Jawed et al., 2019). I found this interesting because even though I don’t consider Twitter to be “professional”, that doesn’t stop someone else from viewing my account and forming an impression of me profesionally.
I think one thing I could improve on is actually using LinkedIn for its intended purpose rather than just having it since it was a requirement. As I get closer to finishing my university life and entering the workforce, there is definetly value in building connections with my classmates, maybe some previous coworkers, or people I meet that are in relatively similar fields/fields I find interesting. I also hadn’t ever considering the value of connecting with people I don’t know well, Rajagopal et al. (2011) found that weaker connections can be useful for discovering new information and ideas. For someone like me who has barely used their LinkedIn, this gives me a fresh perspective on what I could actually get out of the platform.
References
Jawed, S., Mahboob, U., & Yasmeen, R. (2019). Dear Internet! Who am I? Education for Health, 32(1), 33–35.
https://www.ovid.com/jnls/edhe/fulltext/10.4103/efh.efh_232_17~digital-professional-identity-dear-internet-who-am-i
Rajagopal, K., Brinke, D. J.-T., Van Bruggen, J., & Sloep, P. B. (2012). Understanding personal learning networks: Their structure, content and the networking skills needed to optimally use them. First Monday, 17(1).
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3559/3131