What is important in terms of how we represent and manage
those identities online?
For
individuals, it is important that we carefully present, control, and manage our online identity. In social networking, like MySpace or
Facebook, the areas that sets the online identity are: content and design, the profile image,
the Friends list, and the comments section. Photographs, favourite
music and video, friends, “stuff about me” are visual and autobiographical descriptions
of the individual in an instance (Mallan & Giardina, 2009). Boyd (cited in Mallan & Giardina, 2009) notes
“MySpace friends are not just people that one knows, but public displays of
connections”. It gives the visitor an idea who the person is through the list of his or her friends. To be able to change regularly,
decide if the public or only few friends can view it, or even completely
disband it gives the owner control over his or her profile.
Similarly,
what is important for organisations is that public’s perception matches the way
how they want to portray themselves in social media with security and content control in mind. An organisation’s identity is
usually represented by its goals, missions, policies, size, and other elements.
These elements (represented textually or visually or both) need to be taken
into consideration when one tries to create and manage an organisational profile. Organisations create their social media profile as an official page; then the public can become a fan of the organisation
instead of the usual two way friend relationship (Harris, 2010). With
this setup, there is a separate identity of the organisation from the person
managing the organisation’s profile. This is important because fans are in
effect communicating with the organisation, not to a person. Similar to
individuals, control (through the Admin panel) of the presentation of its
identity is an important factor for an organisation.
What can we share and what should we retain as private to
the online world?
Individuals
have different perception of what is classified as public and private information.
Information considered public by a teen-ager could be classified as private by
her forty year old mum. Often, the answer to this different perception is
related to generational or age differences, since sites like Facebook and Myspace
are most popular with youth (Raynes-Goldie, 2010). The bottom line is, if you
believe that the personal information you want to share will not compromise you
in the future, share it, otherwise, keep it to yourself. Once that information
goes into circulation, there is no way of retrieving it back.
For organisations,
it is obvious that confidential information needs to be retained as private. Classification of whether information is
confidential, on hold, or for publication again falls on the management and companies’
policies. Organisations have a positive
reputation that they would like to maintain and they take seriously any
information which appears to originate from them. It is then recommended to have management share the organisational
profile password so they can oversee the content of the organisational profile
(Harris, 2010).
References
Harris, C. (2010). Friend me?: School policy may address friending students online. School Library Journal. Retrieved from
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6724235.html
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6724235.html
Mallan,
K., & Giardina, N. (2009). Wikidentities: Young people collaborating on
virtual identities in social network sites, First Monday,14(6), (1 June 2009). Retrieved from
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2445/2213
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2445/2213
Raynes-Goldie,
K. (2010). Aliases, creeping, and wall cleaning: Understanding privacy in the
age of Facebook, First Monday, 15(1), (4 January 2010).Retrieved from
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