Last of the week

--Originally published at Digital Identity

So before getting into my final thoughts of the course I would like to thank the teacher that made this course posible, Ken Bauer. I quite enjoyed the whole experience, and I feel it actually made a difference on me. I also want to thank Dave Cormier, Laura Gogia, Lee Skallerup, Alan Levine, Amy Burvall, Autumm Caines , Bonnie Stewart, Sundi Richard, Maha Bali, Diego Zavala, Rebecca Hogue and Helen DeWaard for sharing their views on the subject at matter. I really appreciate that you took time of your day to talk with us. You helped build a really great experience, so thank you for that.

Now, into the reflection. The reason that I like this subject is because my digital identity has been cut into two since I started leaving stuff in the internet. Recently, I decided to continue on in the internet with only one persona. This course helped me notice what I really wanted, how to do it, and what would imply to me, and the people around me. It also made me think about stuff that never came across my mind. Like when Ken mentioned that it’s okay to use your laptop on your lap, because after all, it is called a LAPtop. That completely blew my mind. In a more serious note, the course made me notice how important it is to be aware of what is said or posted about you in the web. To a certain point I thought that keeping a different personas would make things all good, but in reality I don’t actually want that. I want for people to know who I am and make sure they know what my work is.

This course helped me decide that I want to keep blogging. I want to get my weird thoughts out there, because maybe someone will be able to get something out of it. It also helps me keeping myself as sane as I can. I’ve always loved writing. It’s even therapeutic. Now, I’ll just post a selective few and share it with others.

I will probable keep updating this blog ever so often, but there’s only so much that I can talk about the subject without just getting out of subject.

So, yeah. Thank you for reading.

Persona

--Originally published at Digital Identity

Today was the last of day of the digital identity course with Ken Bauer at the Tec de Monterrey Campus Guadalajara. Today we were lucky to half a talk with Rebecca Hogue and Helen J. DeWaard. They were nice enough to answer a question related to one of the main concepts of which I wanted to get into the course. Anonymity, and alterante internet personas. You can check out that whole thing right here:

So, as you can see because of my nickname, and also I’ve mentioned it in another post; I didn’t always went by as my real name in the internet. When I started to be more active in the way I preferred to create a different identity for myself. An alter ego even. That’s when Drag was born. At the time, Drag represented who I wanted to be, but this idea was really far from my actual personality in real life. In high school, as I started to become friends with people that heavily used social media my internet persona started to mix with my personal life. It even got to the point in which my friends started to call me Drag instead of Alex, and to this date my closest friends still do.

It wasn’t until recently that I had my digital life pretty much really far apart from my physical life. Now, the only disadvantage that I find of having a different identity out there is that I will probably not get as much recognition for the work that I do publish out in the web. Another reason is because it started to affect my mental health. It got to the point that I would sometimes identify as Drag, and other times as Alex. Because of this reasons and others I decided to get this two entities together. Hence the full name Alejandro “Drag” Güereca.

In its self it’s not wrong to try to be anonymous or have another persona in the internet. But whatever you do, no matter by what name you go through, be proud of your work. Because if you think that it should be out there, chances are at least a few people are going to feel identified with your thoughts.

Also today we did a cool exercise with video editing. So we goofed around a little bit and pulled this gem:

So that’s it for the week. However I do plan on posting tomorrow what I learned, and final thoughts of the stuff that we looked at. So be on the look out for that.

Define where you are

--Originally published at Digital Identity

“smarphone” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by miniyo73

Sometimes you run into those days that they are just no good. As a quick introductory to this blog post I will start by saying that today has been a bit of that to me. First, the flu that I had for a while decided to kick in again. Second, I have no internet at home. Third, and final, the computer in which I usually work in has been updating for the past 2 hours. With that said this blog will most likely go up a little bit later than expected.

Anyways, let’s move into the actual topic of today’s discussion, which is digital interaction, and the effect of this in the physical world. Today in the course a conversation between a classmate, and our teacher Ken Bauer broke out. The classmate had the opinion that you should live in the moment, and that if you spent time in your phone you give of the idea that you’re being a little antisocial. Ken gave a completely opposite point of view in the matter. He explain that someone being in their phone doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t being social. They might be talking to someone else or giving an update of upcoming events. In this matter, I incline more to Ken’s point of view.

Something that technology has given us is a huge way of connectivity. There’s so many tool now to connect with people from all over the world that to a certain degree is unbelievable. Social media helps us to stay connected with people that are really far away. Personally, I still talk to a high school friend of mine that lives in New York, and we talk like we used to even when we lived relatively close to each other. It’s something beautiful, but like everything, there’s some bad sides.

The first bad side is that people abuse this. Yes. People abuse social media. A lot. It good to maintain an online interaction with people, but in certain cases it just gets ridiculous. I’ll give an example. Sometimes, when I’m playing with a friend of mine League of Legends I tell him to tell his brother to hope on, but he doesn’t get up, and goes to talk to his brother, no, he texts him to go online. Isn’t that too much? In my opinion, yeah. We need to learn how to responsibly use the tools that are provided to us.

The second one tackles a little bit of a cultural matter. Some people still have a bad view in modern technology. A great example can be found with my father. Now this is the second time that I mention him, but trust be, he sure is a character. My father loves technology. He’s always up to date, or at least tries to. However he is a little bit stubborn in his ways. Sometimes, he will strike into a conversation with my brother about digital interaction, because he tends to always be checking his phone to reply or talk to friends. My father has the idea that it’s more important to take in what is going on in your surroundings. Of course he knows that keeping up to date in an online environment is also important, but he does go more to the physical concept.

Now personally, I think it’s important to find a balance between real life, and digital life. What do you guys think? I’m really open to ideas about this subject.

Who are you exactly?

--Originally published at Digital Identity

“identity” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by @artnabart

Before jumping into the actual concepts of the subject at matter it’s really important to take into account one thing, and that is one’s individuality. It’s necessary to know who you are exactly to properly portray the person that you are in the internet. If you don’t do this chances are that you will have some trouble, talking from personal experience here, but I will touch that in a later post as well.

Now, today in my Semana i course with Ken Bauer we went in a photo safari. Honestly, I wasn’t very thrilled by the idea, but well it ended up being a pretty interesting exercise. The main reason I liked it is because Ken asked us to photograph stuff that has to do with some keywords based on things we like about us, things we would like to improve about us, and things that nobody knows about out. So, basically the idea was to take pictures that portray to a certain degree concepts that are really present in our personality. Cool stuff right? At the end of this post I’ll put some of the pictures I took and a small text about them, but first let’s talk about why defining yourself as a person is important for your digital presence.

First of all, finding out who you are is important period. You don’t only define your personality but also what you like, your goals, and how to achieve this goals. We all go through that crazy, and weird face in our teens in which we ask ourselves “Who I am?”. Now, you can imagine that at a web based level this question tends to become a little more complicated. Not only for the fact that many youngsters with little to no perception of their individuality go into multiple internet communities, but also because anybody can be whoever they want in the internet. This drives the concept of who you are to a very interesting path. There’s people that have multiple internet personas, and to a certain degree the actions that they have online has no comparison with the ones they do in real life. I can put myself in that category. This can also cause problems to the individual in a mental degree, but that is a subject for another post. In perspective, it’s important to know who you are so you are able to know what you want out there. To know which side of yourself you want to portray to the public eye. This is key in order to maintain a well-developed digital citizenship.

I guess that what I’m trying to say is get to know yourself. It won’t only help you in getting your own voice, or in your digital presence, but it will help you in most things that you do in your life. If you know who you are, and who you want to be; you can do a lot of interesting things for yourself and others.

Real quick I’ll show some pictures that I quite liked from the photo safari.

The first two I like mainly because this two fellows here are close friends of mine from the university. Something really important to me is maintaining good friendships, and making sure my friends are doing all right.

This second one is interesting because it’s a picture of the set of the reto emprededor. Now, I do like innovation, and would like to maybe someday make something that can make a difference.