AR #3
Online persona
I was a teenage girl once. I don’t say this to point out the obvious; I say this because it’s very relevant to our discussion. As a teenage girl I attended middle school, and I am not ashamed to say I was a geek… not a particularly liked geek either. And as any teenage middle school girl will tell you, other teenage middle school girls can be mean! Their favorite weapon, humiliation. Easiest way to achieve said humiliation is a rumor based on a blatant, yet believable lie. These lies can cause all sorts of trouble, spread quickly and can follow you for years, even when proven to be wrong. After all, what is easier to remember… the boring truth or the juicy lie?
Whether we know it or not, this humiliation at the hand or our ‘friends’ is probably the first encounter any of us have in our reputation being ruined/injured within our community. You can think of a middle school as a medium size village; you kind of know everyone by face, but you don’t really know everyone well enough to know what can be or cannot be true. In other words these girls have figured out what Solove was warning us about regarding our reputations and how fragile said reputation can be. The injury to your reputation can be relatively easy to fix, or seemingly impossible to repair until you move onto a bigger pool… high school.
The internet can be a mean middle school teenage girl. Luckily I am now old enough to see most of it coming. That is why I am rather paranoid about the online portion of my life. I’m a fan of virus protection; I regularly monitor my wireless internet to make sure it is secure. Because, I live in different spheres, compartmentalizing my private life from what I want the public to know of me. Working at a bank for years and actively participating in identity theft investigations makes you paranoid too!
Social networking features (blogs, wikis, tweets, etc.) are now a day’s easy to set up (as mentioned in our chapter reading), and almost instrumental in our societal contact with our friends, family, colleagues, etc. How does it apply to me? After all, I’ll be a public school teacher (positive thinking starts early!). Brevard County gives teachers space on the individual’s schools web sites for teachers to set up their own classroom site… something I plan on using extensively to communicate with my students and their parents.
I plan on linking my Google profile(click here ), and my blogs to my future teacher web page, so that I might give my students further insight into who is teaching them, Spanish as a language and how it applies to their lives outside school. [The profile would obviously have to be updated before this.] Blogs can and should be public; otherwise, why are you writing a blog? My Facebook page is a bit different. Mine is very private (security measures to the max and I check for upgrades frequently). Why you ask… it is a social networking site after all. Yes it is, but I use it for my family social networking. I have lots of cousins in various countries all over the world; Facebook is just easier than 19 emails about the same information. My sister works with individuals who have a mental illness and a drug problem; she set up both our security systems on it so that we can’t be found easily. *grin* I’ve yet to get a wiki or a Tweeter account, so I can’t comment on those mediums.
So, I straddle the fence. I am willing to allow some of my information out there. Allowing my students and their parents (and anyone browsing the web for an older Canadian actress with my name according to Google) to get to know me a bit better. But I’ve drawn the line at my family pictures and names. And in my opinion, that’s ok. There should be some sort of buffer between who the world at large sees and who I get to be at home and/or with my family and friends. After all, we are all entitled to some place where we can let our hair down and relax just a little bit. I know that sounds silly since all these places I describe are online, but think about it… nowhere is now offline, a phone can take your picture picking your nose at a stop light just as easily as someone can Google a bad email you sent to the wrong person 10 years ago… no one’s reputation is 100% safe.
Using the metaphor “The internet can be a mean middle school teenage girl” was an awesome insight, and I couldn’t agree more. I have one child in middle school, and another in elementary. We noticed a change, however slight, between the ways that kids acted towards each other. There definitely is the trend toward being mean to those that are not in the current clicks. With the proliferation of computers into the middle schools today, the opportunities for this to spill over into their digital lives is much greater, and more permanent in nature.
ReplyDeleteI also found it refreshing to have someone that has the same approach to their online presence you referred to in “I am rather paranoid about the online portion of my life”. My husband is a techno-geek, and setup our home network. He took great care in making sure it was secure from outside prying eyes. He also works for Symantec, so he’s extremely careful about keeping our computers up to date on the latest security software. But, we differ in our approaches to our online presence. As part of his job and his personal hobbies, he has a very large online presence, while I have taken great strides in keeping my presence to a minimum. Finding the balance between the two of us has been and continues to be a struggle.