I decided to take the cyber sleuthing route this week for my blog post and be an online sleuth for my best friend. She is fairly active on many social medias including Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok and they are all set to public.
Beginning with her profession, you are immediately able to conclude that she is a nurse, as she posted pictures from her college graduation and it is stated in her biography. In addition to posting her college graduation (as well as her high school one), you are also able to conclude how old she is, as well as where she is from. She has posted many photos with her friends and family, as well as pictures from when she played volleyball in high school and college, showing that she loves spending time with the people that she loves and being active. She also has a second instagram account where she posts all of the photos from her digital camera, which shows that she is a very social and outgoing individual. She rarely posts anything regarding her political views, so that area was hard to identify where she stands.
If did not know my best friend already, my conclusion from looking at her social media is that she is very passionate about the work that she does and that she cares deeply about the people in her life. She frequently reposts nursing related content on her Instagram story, showing that she keeps in the loop of what is happening in the nursing world, which would make me more comfortable if I was her patient.
If I were to make one suggestion to her, it would be to put her account settings onto private. Especially after taking this class for 10 weeks now, I am much more educated on how to be safe online and how easy it is to find information about people, especially when their account settings are on public. Knowing that anyone can see your account and follow you is a little unsettling.
After noticing that my best friends digital camera account was tagged on her Instagram account, it reminded me of the “Having multiple online identities is more normal than you think” article. I wouldn’t say her digital camera account is a “second online identity”, but it definitely has a lot more posts than are on her main account. Additionally, I remember growing up that many people I went to school with had “spam” Instagram accounts or private snapchat stories, where they would post things that they didn’t think belonged on their main account. In my opinion, it makes it harder to understand who someone truly is when they have one account that appears to be extremely put together and then another hidden one that is much more “unfiltered”. I do think it has become a tad more normalized to post freely whatever you want on Instagram , whenever you want, but there is still a great amount of pressure to make a “perfect” post.
I agree with making accounts private. I’ve always had public accounts but this class has made me realize that anyone can see what I post, which is super uncomfortable to think about.