(image source: https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/facebook-still-top-choice-for-social-savvy-meps-report-shows/ )
Influencing Opinions with Your Online Life
Social media has become commonplace today within the United States. People are using it share everything about themselves, from posting significant milestones in one’s life to what they had for dinner. This has caused social media to become a wealth of personal information. This information is being used to build a person’s identity online which may not just be available to friends and family. It may be available to potential employers and even the public. While in some cases a look at someone’s online life may provide insight into that person’s behavior, it may not be an accurate representation of that person. This identity that is formed online may or may not accurately reflect the personal academic persona. In some respects, the similarities and differences in a person’s online and offline personas can be quite drastic. When reviewing my own online life and comparing it with my academic career, I found a dramatic difference in how I built my two personas.
Online identities can be very telling about a person in some cases such as the frequency of a person’s social media page updates. Does the page update every couple of hours or every couple of months? My page is one of the latter, having only sparse activity on my social media pages. I have a single video on my YouTube channel, a video for a Spanish project. My last post on Facebook was shared on October 2016 with occasional other activities happening between then and December 2017. There is not even a picture of myself posted on my Facebook profile. Even with these few activities, such as greeting others happy birthday or holiday greetings, there are only a few things can be seen from profiles that I am not friends with. These two sites are my only social media accounts. However, my online profile is professional. There are no embarrassing photos or video floating around my social media accounts or bigotry remarks associated with me. These two factors may play a role in how others will perceive my civic persona in the future.
The amount of activity from my online life is a stark difference from my academic persona, which is very active from both coursework and organizations I am a part of. My academic life consists of being not only a member of many academic clubs and organizations, holding officer positions in some of them. To sum up my academic profile quickly, it consists of consistently getting on getting well above passing grades, having a GPA of 3.640, and balancing club activity. It is very lively and time consuming. This differs greatly from my online life which is rarely updated.
Sparseness on a person’s social media accounts can play both positive and negative roles in affecting one’s perspective when evaluating my civic persona. By not having much posted online, there are few things that can be held against me. I do not have accounts on most social media sites. Of the remaining data, much of it consists of outdated information about liked movies, bands, and television shows. Lack of data can also contain a negative connotation with it as well. While this lack of information provides no negative examples, it also provides no positive examples either. It shows no personal achievements or information. The number of a person’s friends and their names can be seen but without other context such as group photos or conversation, the extent of the relationship could be unclear. A person could also conclude that I am not a dedicated person. The account was made, there were some updates to the page, but ultimately the page was not upkept.
While searching for me on social media, a person would find very little to go on about me. By limiting the number of things posted and the content of posts, it allows for a more professional profile. This also means that if content is available, it is not difficult to find. There is no unnecessary clutter that needs to be searched through. This may be a good thing for prospective employers making inquiries to save them time. It could also mean that much of the information that they are looking for is not there. There are some arbitrary likes associated with my page, but these would only play a small part in how someone would form a perspective of a civic persona on a person. Daily social life would need to be accounted for to form a proper civic persona, but it cannot be the driving factor in the decision. It is likely that even active social media accounts would not contain everything to for a complete civic persona. The limited information found may be a good start to a person but not an entire record to go off. For a more detailed account of my online persona, a person would have to search not only on my online profile, but the profiles of other that are associated with me for potential posts that relate to me.
Using a person’s online persona may be a good start when seeking information to form an opinion on that person. While reflecting on my personal social media profiles, I find it hard to think that my offline life is related to my online persona. To form an accurate assessment of an individual, it is necessary to take time to get to know them personally. Both my online life and academic life are still uncompleted in respect to providing a full picture of who I am. I believe that my online persona does not accurately reflect my civic persona by not showing my personal strengths and flaws but rather interests I had in the past.