I asked my Anthropology of Mass Media students to do a similar digital identity curation assignment to review their online presence. While I assigned this task to my students, I have never examined my own digital presence. To do this for the DigPINS workshop, I started thinking about my roles online in relations to the Resident <–> Visitor spectrum.
As I worked through which online communities I am a member of and how my participation varies in each of them and overarching theme of developing my professional persona and research threads came out of each, regardless of where it is on the spectrum. I think the ways I’ve approached curating my public digital identity is through some anxiety of being a new and temporary faculty member searching for a landing spot in a permanent position. So as I see myself online currently, my roles are not very intersecting or nuanced but cover a variety of my professional interests. That being said, I present topics and ideas without interaction or cultivation of my membership as an interactant in online communities. Similarly, I had a jolt when I realized that I value the digital mediation of my relationships less than face-to-face interaction, something that has been shown in a recent stark light due to COVID19 quarantine interactions. I therefore see myself as less integral to online and digitally mediated communities, which feeds back into the ways I retreat from cultivating relationships through digital interactions. Changing my digital identity from a presentational one to an interactional one is one of my goals for this workshop.
Online technology and media is an incredibly diverse and ever-changing platform for interaction and connection. As I’m gaining more of a foothold in remote teaching, I hope to shift my online presence and digital identity to more of an interactional one.
I enjoyed reading this post Jessica. I, too, prefer face-to-face interactions and have found the last few months quite challenging. I rarely post online, and therefore have very little online presence, but so far I have not felt the need to. This is something that may change with DigPINS!
Thank you for your thoughts! I’m glad I’m not alone in this realization and the double realization that this is changing.
I’m intrigued by your phrase “present(ing) topics and ideas without interaction”. So many online platforms encourage this – the retweet and share buttons which don’t encourage much more commentary than finding a pull quote (or more commonly a bland “this is good!”) There is lots of value in passing along information, but it’s limited if we don’t actually interact with the ideas and each other, or if we respond only with a Like button.
(This all sounds like a good challenge for me and the very presentational KenyonCIP social media presence.)
You’ve reminded me that many years ago I wrote something tangentially related to this topic of presenting but not relating, inspired by a similar post and multimedia joke from Alan Levine.
(I think every summer I re-discover that I can use HTML code to put links in these comments fields…)
These are great! Thank you for sharing- and for showing me how to embed links into comments!
I’ve been thinking about this for a couple days now since I first saw your comment and it is absolutely correct that so many platforms encourage engagement through “like” buttons or comment boxes, and I had not realized that I actually did/do not really use them! More often I use private messaging features, which is a form of the online engagement facets though not on the public end of the engagement spectrum. I like thinking of this as a challenge to change a presentational social media presence and I’m interested in learning more ways to do this. There’s been some really interesting and novel things pop up in my private social media feeds due to current protests that I think may be a good place to start.
Hi Jessica, thanks for sharing this! Something that really resonated for me was “I therefore see myself as less integral to online and digitally mediated communities”. I’ve been reflecting on my own attitudes and came to a disturbing realization: I often assume that my voice in any context (digital or otherwise) is contingent on “proving” that I belong there. And therefore any opinion I have can’t be expressed until it meet a gauntlet of criteria: truly unique, urgent, evidence-based, well-reasoned, connected to prior statements, and sensitive to everyone’s feelings. I don’t know why I do this, since I’m often in discussions where the majority of statements meet none of these criteria, but I suspect it reflects marginalized aspects of my identity. Does this happen to you at all? And if so, do you think it affects your digital identity?
This is very interesting and I appreciate your feedback here! I feel very similarly that my online voice needs further curation or refinement before posting due to the permanence of the written word. I hadn’t thought of this in quite this way, and now as I write this I also know even writing online can be edited, revised, or responded to in a way I think I’m not yet comfortable with incorporating into my thinking when I post text online. I’ll have to give it more thought about what I think this process reflects of my identity, but it also resonates with me that you attribute this to reflecting marginalized aspects of your identity. I’ll keep thinking about this one! Thanks!