--Originally published at Debugging My Mind
Digital identity. That’s a word I’ve heard around these days with the advent of social media popularity and the shift in society it’s caused. Today in a course dedicated to the topic, we had a chance to have an invited speaker to talk to us about it and we’ll continue to do so throughout the rest of the week.
It’s an interesting shift that exists between the time people didn’t use social media or well, the internet whatsoever to change into a period where kids learn how to use it and fully interact with it very young. In my experience it was a very drastic change, from being a kid in a time where, at least personally, didn’t have access to internet or computers to a really fast switch where technology developed incredibly quick. We ended up having these memories from almost no computers, no internet to a point where almost any device can connect to it, in basically a decade. Now we have to worry not just about our professional skills, our studies, in other words our curriculum, but we also have to worry about the image that we have on the internet.
I’m the kind of person that when young was taught to not use my real name when using the internet, which followed into me using an “alias” just like the one on this blog and also creating a “second life”. Offline you have to follow the moral rules of the country/region you’re from, quite diligently, thing that changes when you’re interacting online.
Calling it a second life always stroke me as weird, as if it was a completely different person the one you see online to the one you see in real life, I mean, of course there’s gonna be differences, kind of like how you behave with a certain group of friends compared to another one, I’d never do online something I wouldn’t do in real life, but at the same time, I became able to do things online I can’t quite do as properly in person, and by that I mean, collecting my thoughts more, taking my time to reply to every message without pressure, getting the true reaction from me, compared to in person where I tend to be more explosive and sudden about my replies.
One may argue that one is better than the other, or that it indeed starts becoming a different “me” or a “second life” if you look at the differences. The thing is, recently I decided to start “merging” them per say, making both more similar to each other and making them “one life” again.
I do think it’s important to keep a distinction between the professional and the hobby/informal talk and posts, but maybe there’s also a need for something inbetween, which I’ll try to do here.
