Using social media web sites is one of the most common activity for today’s people. Any website is considered as a social media platform, such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace; visual websites such as Youtube. Those sites offer today’s people a way for entertainment and communication. For this reason, we should be aware of the nature of digital identity through the various of our online activities. Digital identity is used to describe an individual presents to across all digital communicates that the people is represent in, which includes both the explicit representation of the person, such as name, information, email…; and the implicit representation of the person such as online activities (Warburton & Hatzipanagos 2012, p106). This blog will start with “what is my online persona”, which introduce the construction of my online identity. The ideas of modern online identity has been shift towards interactive media, peer to peer form of communication and various forms of online participation. For example, people using social media sites for sharing, communicating and participating through the study and work day.
Online media sites provides a new platform to communicate the people besides your friends and families. Digital identity was often presented with different spin that my indicate the strength of social media. Take twitter as an example, twitter offers me an efficient method to keeping in touch with friends and tracking online trend. If a new brand is spreading or a celebrity has done something newsworthy, it will appear on twitter. In addition, I can use twitter as a platform of breaking news by following news channels, news TV shows or journalists. Twitter also allows me to promoting myself academically to study and research the resources of my college courses.
According to Reid’s research of online behavior of social media student, Twitter’s popularity in academia has been increasing, and is most commonly communicate with students and disseminate information (Reid & Pruchenko, 2013). My online behavior can be considered as academic research for college study and more in further researching, which aim to getting more professional study’s supports on internet. The multiple online websites and media tools provides highly flexible and convenient platform to educate, entertain and communicate. Twitter as microblogging application sites allows users to send bursts of information to its followers in 140 characters. The diverse online media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are playing and important roles of the implement into courses as instructional resources and study tools, which due to its convenient functions. It can be used as a tool for brainstorming by collecting links, make notes or communicate with teachers or other professional people, and exchange ideas with other people who interested in the same topic. These online media sites can be seem as an open learning journal.
Online identity also refers to as other aspects that are reified as bits of data, such as the text in a blog post or a digital photograph, which we may experience in offline interactions are reified, or represented as data on internet. Visual representation is important to social media users to posts creative and interactive, it brings with many opportunities to show the world whatever self you look (Humphreys 2016). There are the social media sites like Facebook and Twitter with all their simple life buttons, and those on which I construct my online activities. My social media site’s behaviors were all about share and communicate, which reflecting by insert images in a tweets or write comments on Facebook or Twitter. In a sense, my visual contents of social media are attempt to grabbing a piece of “snackable” texts which my friends can understand and engage with ease. Visual content can easily accomplish things that plain text articles struggle with, the fast delivery information and emotion that engage the viewers.
The term of digital identity also used in individual presentation that the people represented in all digital communicate platforms, such as written presentation. Written presentation can be blogs or online diaries, also refers to sharing comments on social media sites. For instance, one of my previously course called ALC205 has been used the blogging method in the process of unit study. I’ve been posting to it in the past months, which were further discussing the topics that teacher mentioned in the classes. The personal blogs served to help me share culturally identifying qualities with other classmates (Price 2007). After I create a personal blog, I e-mail my teacher that he posted on the study lists under the heading blog posts #ALC 205. After logging in to their personal page, students were instructed go to all of the personal blogs and post comments (as the example below). However, although online activities are all about share and communicate, some forms of my personal representation are intended to be share with limited people, like family photo album, which is collective self-representation of family that is kept in the home and shown to some but by no means all guests (Rettberg 2016).
Addressing the analysis of online identity, Robs explains that identities are performed, communicated, represented in relation with those who are not necessary physically present in our lives but also with those we engaging with in the networked social (Rob 2016, p2). Backing the topic with which I mentioned at first, online identity can be considered as the defining characteristics of a person in online space, which makes the person feel he has his own character and is different from other people. In order to understanding personal online identity, it is necessary to understanding personal social identity, which refers to the person is belonging a particularly group. It influences people’s behavior through the process of categorization, such as students, professionals. For example, study and research purpose are the most important behavior in my online identities, whether the process of my personal studies or school’s learning.
Reference list
Rettberg, J 2016, Self-Representation in Social Media, Sage Press, Bergen.
Rob, C 2016, Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the online self, Elsevier Press, United States of America.
Warburton, S, Hatzipanagos, S, 2012, Digital Identity and Social Media: Reputation on the Social Media, Information Science Reference Press, United States of America.
My broader ALC203 related online activity
I’ve been touching digital media in last trimester by learning ALC205 Digital media in the surveillance society. In this unit, I’ve learned many academic knowledges of online media, such as how to use Twitter, how to write a blog post and embed tweets in it and so on. As an international student, I barely using these “western” social media sites to sharing and studying. This unit offers me a good opportunity to understanding how western people using social media, and what’s the advantages of these social media sites. Thus, I started to written blogs to further discuss the topics that we mentioned in the class. Here are the links of my blog: https://wordpress.com/post/weigaosite.wordpress.com/25
https://wordpress.com/post/weigaosite.wordpress.com/249
https://wordpress.com/post/weigaosite.wordpress.com/359
Site Title 