Topic 2: One of me or many of me?
“Individuals have the opportunity to cultivate an identity as part of their socio-professional activity. Moreover, they have the right to question and reflect about that identity.” (Mcluhan, 1968). The Internet gives individuals the freedom to create an online presence through different identities. But by allowing anonymity, are we essentially opening up the freedom to deceive?
As we spend more time connected on our digital devices, we now live in two worlds living digital double lives, we create our media and our media turns and shapes us. The Internet gives us the ability to craft our personas but to what extend can we control who we are online and to what extend are we bound to who we actually are in the real world.
Living in public all the time and having our thoughts and actions curved for eternity, are we really free to be ourselves online? Or are we constantly preforming, constantly being watched and plotting our actions like updates and strategy game. Nowadays almost whatever we do online we leave trace by leaving our digital footprint, which is used by third party companies for targeted adverts.
Multiple online identities benefit:
- Presentation
- Reputation
Presentation deals with the way in which we showcase our practice online and how we contribute in certain shared online spaces. Whereas reputation focuses on what others think of us. Judgment of people online takes a precise form via the different networks of communication. Our behaviour is modelled and judged socially and culturally. So management of online identity is essential as it can have impacts on our online activities both face-to-face and online. The Guardian recently reported a young girl lost her job before even starting because of a negative tweet: (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/11402369/Rude-tweet-gets-teenager-fired-before-starting-new-job.html).
However… Lifehacker presents cons to having multiple online identities:
- Violation of service for many companies. Facebook’s Terms of Service states: “you will not create more than one personal account.”
- Splits audience. When maintaining a strictly professional profile, individuals might have valuable contacts from their personal page – who could help in their professional field.
Personally I think by looking at all the pros and cons of having one or multiple online identities it’s not easy to decide which one to go for, as nowadays even the minor and unnecessary things you do will need the use of your identity in certain ways and some people may not feel comfortable with giving their identity, or they do not trust it, in some cases they will use a fake identity just for the sake of being on the safe side. But I think it really depends on the individual’s intention and the situation and what they believe is best for them.
Sources:
Davidson, L (2015), The Guardian, Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/11402369/Rude-tweet-gets-teenager-fired-before-starting-new-job.html.
(Costa, C., & Torres, R. (2011) http://eft.educom.pt/index.php/eft/article/view/216/126
https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
