I understand networking through social media as it means that an individual can make use of social media to meet others with similar interests/qualities/visions/connections to others/professions that can potentially help his/her/their personal and/or professional life. It can be a life-long learning and self-promoting process that involves “the attitude of a professional learner”, putting the learning ideas into action, and actually managing one’s online network (Rajagopal, Joosten-ten Brinke, Van Bruggen & Sloep, 2011); or it can be a life-long personal space for one to maintain and create connections with others.

The rise of the Information Age put individuals into a widely connected digital realm that constantly shares and updates new pieces of information and knowledge for each one who is involved. It seems inevitable to join this collective digital space (e.g., I am taking this course through online registration and I am now writing to others that share this digital social space).

I understand digital identity as one’s presence online. Often it seems that one is facing anonymous others when sharing information through social media, and the posts are static once published. For instance, I cringe when looking back at what I have posted during my teenage year. Besides, it can be problematic when one’s professional identity in real life collides with his/her/their digital identity as they may have a different context in time, space, and audience. That is, my young posts are no longer representing my current identity, and I am not the supposed audience checking them in the right time.

On the one hand, the idea of the global village is emphasized through the intensive usage of social media. It creates countless opportunities for one to join, as it surely provides powerful pathways for one to build strong and meaningful connections with others. On the other hand, it excludes those without access to the online space and take part in the individual social networking as well as the global economy context that requires a digital identity. It also put people’s privacy at risk when informed consent is rather ambiguous in an online context when data exposed in unwanted and unexpected ways involving more and more people. There seem to be lack of recognitions of the lack of boundaries for data privacy these days (Boyd, 2012).

References

Boyd, D. (2012). Networked privacy. Surveillance & Society, 10(3/4), 348-350. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v10i3/4.4529

Rajagopal, K., Joosten-ten Brinke, D., Van Bruggen, J., & Sloep, P. B. (2011). Understanding personal learning networks: Their structure, content and the networking skills needed to optimally use them. First Monday, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v17i1.3559