Digital identity: the personal and the professional
[Photo of the tantrum T-Rex and the wise owl - the two extreme end points of my digital identity spectrum?]
I am always interested in the ways people talk about being online and it was during the first #BYOD4L twitter chat on the topic ‘connecting’ that the issue of the personal (more private and informal) social media presence versus the professional (public and formal) presence came up. Quite a few people said that they used specific tools (facebook was mentioned by a few) only for private communication, i.e. with friends and families.
I suppose the potential for tension between public and private personas is nothing new and we can easily recognise that we behave differently and talk about different things depending on the context, who we are with etc. (I feel like I should be offering up a lot of academic references for this so I apologise in advance as I am just writing some inital thoughts here).
So the worry about using social media like twitter is perhaps related to the increased potential for conflation of these contexts or ‘multitudes that we contain’ (to paraphrase Whitman’s Song of Myself). And as the #BYOD4L twitter chat was about the benefit of using twitter for making connections for learning, specificallly in relation to our work interests, then things tend to become complicated indeed.
Some people in the twitter chat were concerned that non-work tweets would annoy colleagues or put them off following their twitter account. I mentioned that some of the people I most enjoy following tweet about many different aspects of their lives - not just their research - and this includes frustrations, hobbies, photos of kittens etc. To me these people are tapping into the power of ongoing conversations and engagement as opposed to simply broadcasting messages.
The professional/personal tension was expressed, amongst other things, in some advice that one of the participants had been given about setting up a twitter account: that a professional twitter account should be about 75% professional and 25% personal.
I find this bit of ‘advice’ fascinating because I can’t imagine being able to use my twitter account in this way. The conversation went on to mention that the 25% personal was to inject some kind of ‘authenticity’ (here I guess authenticity means personality or the sense that there is human being tweeting and not a bot?).
The concern about when to be formal and informal is also something identified by Martin Weller in his book The Digital Scholar (2011), where he outlines some questions about blogging in relation to academic practice “Should bloggers use institutional systems or separate their blogging and formal identities” (Weller 2011, p.5). He goes on to say that the "open scholar deliberately mixes personal and professional observations in order to be an effective communicator within these networks and does not seek to keep them distinct" (Weller 2011, p.100).
And if you are interested in this I recommend following Martin Weller on twitter - @mweller
It is certainly interesting to contemplate the feasibility of and reasons for keeping online activities in different ‘spaces’ separate?
