What is a digital identity?
According to the article “Digital Professional Identity: Dear Internet! Who am I?”(Jawed, Mahboob, & Yasmeen, 2019), digital identity is the foundation of our online presence, including the make up of our qualities and opinions that distinguish us from one another. Moreover, your digital identity is made up of every appearance you make online, from posts you like, to how you engage with others in comment sections of social media. To continue, your digital identity becomes your footprint on the web, making all online activity easily traceable and therefore, accessible. Thus, your digital actions and communications can affect opportunities, such as future employment and scholarships.
How do personal versus professional approaches to digital identity affect social media use?
Someone that is using social media for professional reasons, should not be posting controversial or offensive context onto their platform, as that becomes a direct reflection of their companies culture. However, professionals utilize online platforms to interact with people and promote their business. Therefore, their digital identity will probably surround ideas focussed around their professional goals, instead of personal opinions. In contrast, personal approaches to digital identity tend to reflect ones engagement with family and friends. Meaning that their personal identity would tend to be made up of more intimate conversations and beliefs.
How do digital identities converge in networked publics – what are the impacts and/or benefits?
It is becoming increasingly hard to to keep your personal digital identity completely separate from your professional life. Thus, with the two digital identities becoming blurred, one needs to be aware of the standard on how much they are comfortable sharing. This is possible as people tend to use their real name for both their personal and professional accounts. Therefore, someone from their work community can easily access ones personal account with just their name alone. Additionally, it is becoming increasingly more popular that employers are looking at potential employees personal accounts to gain perspective on their interests outside of work. Specifically, employers want to make sure that a prospective employee would be a good fit with the rest of the company’s staff. Thus, posts made to personal accounts that reflect inappropriate behaviour or offensive content in the workplace, could cost someone a job.
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
I like your last few sentences about employers looking at personal social media accounts Mikayla! It’s something that’s often forgotten when posting on a personal account that anyone can see, but is obviously incredibly important.
Yeah I agree with you and John. We often think that PLN is a private account, so we will say anything in PLN.But employers may also look at PLN to determine what kind of person you are.
Hello, mikayla. I like your sharing about personal and professional PLN. It’s true nowadays our PLN plays a more and more important role in our future opportunities. Thus, our PLN, to some extent, is not only used to express ourselves but also to meet others’ expectations. We should pay particular attention to the language we use and try to present more of our positive personalities.