The idea of a digital footprint seems kind of scary because of the idea everything on the internet follows you around. There are many questions that arise about our digital lives, privacy and ethical boundaries when it comes to the internet.
An interesting task that we took part of in class was to search yourself up on google. A future employer will look you up online and “stalk” you, which is fair because they are trying to see the type of person that they are employing. This exercise will make you want to go through your entire social media and delete photos, delete comments and make your profile look professional.
In the article, “Split Image” by Kate Fagan, a girl named Madison Holleran died because of committing suicide. What was interesting about this article was that it seemed like Madison’s life on social media was very happy and fun. She was a star athlete, smart student and was a great friend. She hid behind photos. She posted photos of her smiling, doing fun things and standing beside her loving family. This article describes her as living an edited life and that people around her were viewing her edited life on social media. No one would have thought she was hurting inside and in need of help. It is important to ask for help and know that is it OK to not be OK! We spend so much time viewing other peoples’ edited lives on social media which may make us feel bad about our own lives. We start to act fake online just to make ourselves look good for other people following us. I believe that if we continue to keep doing this round and round spiral on social media, our mental health will deteriorate. Sometimes, it is just as fun to live in the moment and not post about it.
This summer, I went to an Olivia Rodrigo concert and a Tyle Childers concert in Vancouver and I did not take any photos or videos of either concert. I am so happy about that decision because I can remember every little moment about that concert and can remember how at peace I was not having to pull out my phone for every song. I watched each concert with my eyes, no through my screen!
In the article, “Having multiple online identities is more normal than you think”, the author talked about how there are so many people that have multiple online identities but are still only one person. Each social media app sometimes may look like a completely different person. Different social media platforms acquire different audiences. For example, VSCO seems to be a place where people just post anything they want whenever they want. But that is the audience for VSCO. VSCO is just a place where you can post what you want. Meanwhile, Instagram is a platform where you want to screen what you are posting because you want to maintain an appearance on Instagram. It is important to check all social media platforms as an employer because it is all public and it is all out there. Each platform will act as a piece to create the whole puzzle of that person. Be careful with what you post on each site because each site can be reached.
In Katia’s blog post, she talked about how scammers can pop up in your Facebook friend requests. Catfishing is a scam that gets people to do what the cat fisher wants them to do. There are many victims who fall for this because it might be scary and/or feel real. There are so many fake accounts out there and it is important to screen your friend requests and people that message you because you accept or message them back.
Cyber-vigilantism and cyber-shaming are complex. They can be used as tools for holding people accountable for their actions but can also become a place to just attack the person who messed up online. Another considerations is the long-term impact on those who are being shamed. It is important to take situations with context. But where do we draw the line between holding others accountable and causing irreversible harm?
In the Ted Talk called “How one tweet can ruin your life” by Jon Ronson, we see that Justine Sacco’s life was torn to shreds. People started cyber-shaming Justine from left and right. Nobody helped her out and stood by her. Her tweet was not a very good tweet to post online but that didn’t give permission to just dehumanize her. She had no chance to speak up for herself because she was on a flight so she was just getting ripped apart without anyone knowing what her tweet really meant. Tweets can get retweeted and sent to millions of people in a matter of minutes. People were so excited to see her suffer that no one was talking about the horrible comments being made about her. I don’t believe that this is real social justice. People shouldn’t start trying to become judges or jurors. We need to all stay in our lane because if this was to happen to you, would you can to be shamed to this extent like Justine? What we can learn from Justine’s situation is that we have to be ever so careful with what we say online.
Do our digital footprints have a right to be forgotten? Sometimes our digital footprints go back to when we were young. Is that fair? I am a different person now then when I was 6 years old. I think that there is a point where everything can be forgotten. It will still be online and hard to miss but sometimes things are obviously said or posted when a person was really young. It isn’t fair to assume who a person is because of a photo they posted when they were young. It is hard to avoid though when it is all out online.
Overall, we need to be careful with what we post, tweet, or even comment online. We don’t want something seemingly innocent at the moment to ruin our future lives!