Managing Multiple Personas

It is a difficult thing to manage multiple persona’s. In a sense, that is the outcome of the empowerment that social networking sites give individuals, the ability to develop multiple persona’s. To be more specific, this is opportunity to build a persona that is different from whom we are. Sherry Turkle (1999) explains this when she writes,  “the fact that self-presentation is written in text means that there is time to reflect and edit ones composition, which makes it easier for the shy to be outgoing, and the nerdy to be sophisticated”.

As I build my personal brand, I must take into account the privacy implications. One of my classmates mentioned earlier in the forums that they never really keep in mind the content they are uploading. As afcallaghan mentioned in her minor blog earlier, “Tweets are made in the heat of a moment and retracted; images are posted and cannot be retrieved.” We cannot afford to be so careless, particularly in today’s online world; the risks of carelessness are life threatening. I am aware of the fact that even sometimes when we are extremely careful online, privacy can be beyond our control. We have seen examples of this time and again especially with celebrity. As we create another “world” all the threats of the current physical world in which we live in are also re-created.

With that said, how do you manage keeping in mind the privacy implications of what we post? I believe one must have a guiding force, as I mentioned earlier in my minor blog. My guiding force has developed into one that takes into account future employment opportunities. Parallel to what the Instructor Dale mentioned in the forums, it is important to know your audience. Know who will and can access your blogs or your social networking profiles and sites. Again there are limitations to the previously mentioned, because of the fact that the trail is almost if not infinite online.

AndersAlbrechtslund’s paper in which he talks about participatory surveillance really sparked my interest. The Idea that online social networking can be seen as a tool for surveillance, not surveillance in the sense of an authoritative figure looking over you, but a flat form of surveillance. In this form of surveillance the person who is believed to be under surveillance (in this sense is all of us with a social networking site), is empowered and has control by actively resisting the gaze (Albrechtslund, 2008).

I made an interesting connection as I read this paper. I made a connection to the fact that with online social networking sites today we now have the ability to control who we want to see what we want. For Example Facebook has a feature where you have the ability to pick and choose which friends you want to see your entire profile. You can also pick specific areas of your profile that you would like certain people to see only.  I must point out that such as the physical world there’s a potential of accidents, in this case glitches.

I would like to end on this note, how careful can we really be? Even without a Facebook account my pictures still wind up on Facebook.

Social Media Values

It happened around the beginning of the 12th grade. I thought to myself if this was a feeling that I exclusively felt or was shared by many. I began to wonder why I was spending so much of my time on the web browsing the profiles of individuals I rarely spoke to. Gradually I began to cut down my friend lists to people I actually talked to and cut of the people that were more of acquaintances than friends. My Facebook friends list dropped significantly. That wasn't the end of it though, I now began to wonder why I wanted to browse the profiles of individuals at all. Most of the time the things that appeared on their profiles were not things that correctly reflected who they really were in person. I made the executive decision and deleted my Facebook account (deactivated till delete began available). 

The problem wasn't that my profile poorly reflected who I am, but more because I didn't have a guiding force in terms of what I put of my Facebook page. I didn't realize the impact of social media sites on the way people perceive you, and most importantly the kind of trouble it can get you into (Facebook significantly at the time). More often that not friends and people I didn't know began to get into conflicts due to things that came up on their Facebook page. Other times when you meet an individual in person they are nothing like the way you thought they would be from their profile. People seemed to be loosing their filters.

Now Twitter on the other hand is something much more up my alley for several reasons. One, because of the simplicity of the user interface. Navigation of the site couldn't arguably be simpler. Two, the character limit only allows individuals 140 chances to say unnecessary things (which has be proven to be more than enough). 

There was an article sent to me by my aunt that has been a guiding force to the way I use my social media sites (Twitter is my only active social media site). It talks about the importance of building a personal brand and how social media sites play a pivotal role in your brand building process. 

Technological Empowerment

What does technological empowerment mean to me? It means being able to modify and adjust technology to work for me and not the other way around. After watching a very interesting Ted Talk , it dawned on me what angle I wanted to push in this blog entry.  I still take the stance that “Yes I feel very empowered by technology”. One of the hardest things for me to do is to “stop thinking about technology as a thing (or group of things) of some sort and, instead, view what we call "technology" as a set of socio-cultural practices” (Bradley). For so many years when I hear the word technology the first thing that comes to mind is an immediate technological device.

When I think about the idea of personal freedom and how the empowerment of the individual reduces that of the state (Barbook and Cameron, 53), I can draw clear connections to Clay Shirky’s Ted Talk. He talks about how democracies can learn from open source programming. The idea that programs should be shared and accessed by all, allowing individuals to change and modify them. The connection is made as to how the government can adapt a principle similar to this by allowing collaborative input from individuals in decision-making processes. Imagine this, a collaborative network where individuals can create laws, others can come in and modify them till it meets their desires. Now you can immediately imagine the ramifications of such a thing. There are all kinds of implications that apply, other than the fact that the more people giving input the longer and harder it is to come to an agreements.

 I thought I might take a different approach on this and look at technological empowerment from a programmer’s perspective. As a programmer you have total control of the technology, you have the ability to write programs that can do anything you want them to do; Programs are the forefront of majority, if not all of modern day technology. In line with my earlier description of what technological empowerment means to me, this exemplifies that to the highest degree. On the other hand one must also understand the limitations of this. There is an enormously small community, of people who have this kind of power – people who understand and know how to write computer programs – in comparison to the overall population.