Identity revisited. Exploring the boundaries of our online selves.
A
few Internet years ago I wrote a post about my own identity online. I
was trying to collect my thoughts around what I show and not show in
various online spaces. I lingered on hyperlinked ideas of how up
close and personal blogging can be as well as the certainty that you
may be quite private and still reveal who you are. At least, the bits
of yourself that can fuel these connections we make online, even
nurture them into sincere friendships.
My
mind was drifting along with some tweets the other night, when I felt this 2011 post and the idea of how I network online needs revisiting.
Alec
Couros posed this question:
What is your personal/professional policy in terms of what you talk about on Twitter and what you avoid talking about? #edchat— Alec Couros (@courosa) March 6, 2016
Further
down the thread, Alec focuses his thinking camera lenses:
"well,
perhaps not policy but tendencies over a given time that
retroactively provide your usual limits."
I
heard myself drafting a few responses in my mind, which I never got
round to tweeting.
Why?
-you ask.
My
not responding fluently and confidently could be, at first, charged
to some degree of shame or fear suddenly surfacing to silence me.
Perhaps, this silence could be hinting at some gender issue. My guess
-or my preconception- is that men tend to be more prolific and brave
to speak their thoughts online. I lack serious statistics but, a
bird's view of people I read and follow gives me the impression it is
mostly men doing the talking. There are women bloggers I know who
gradually post less, much less frequently than slow male bloggers. Of
course, you cannot generalise.
Back
to my own silence. I think it's due to a simpler issue. In order to
answer that tweet I should've had to bullet point topics I do not
mention online and break my own rules. Frankly, I feel quite good and
safe sticking to boundaries of my own making whether online or not.
I
do not regret those unwritten tweets. I am more fascinated by digging
into a mysterious source of trust in myself that tells me something
is very important in that question which definitely needs answering,
yet -all at once- I feel something, at first elusive to
classification, needs rewording to make sense. At least for me. So I
go into pause mode.
When
the ideas and words suddenly sound as if I were listening to music
from the bottom of a swimming pool, that is the moment I know an
important issue for me has been touched. I need not lose myself in
the stream. I need out, out where I can do some slow thinking far
from the twitter race track of responses. My version of slow thinking
looks like a blank page, a proper keyboard and my cup of tea.
Offline. And time, oh yeah.
Now.
What
makes Alec's question so compelling?
Five
years ago I pondered on what
I post online. What you get to see of me as a result of my decisions.
Alec's question points at how
personal or professional you choose to be online. It was the slight
perspective shift towards the process that kidnapped my thoughts the
other night.
How
you post is often taken for granted. If you become fluent online, you
may easily skip this reflection and go straight to what should be
discussed. It is important to mark the omission because what you
skipped (hey, what you inadvertently silenced) could point to the
cogs in a broken online machine that need assessing and replacing.
How do you get to respond or not to important human issues online?
What drives you? What triggers you? There's a starting point for
fruitful conversations about topics still unnamed and hidden behind
the hype, the flashlights of the tech being used. If we thought about
alternatives to framing questions like...
Is
(name the tool) good or bad for (pick your interest), what would we
be discussing instead?
The
tool is a mere anecdote, not the story.
People
who do not have an existence in social networks speak of Facebook or
Twitter as places you go to and contaminate yourself with the
surroundings. Really? Are you a different self when you change online
space? A simple Google search can be so telling.
How
personal or professional you choose to be online and why is no doubt
a great question.
Yet.
What
kind of bells did the original question ring to trigger my suspicious
mind and bring me to a response halt?
Now
I clearly see it was the word Twitter that stopped me. Twitter used
to mean a gathering place we go to. To me Twitter is just paper
sticky notes, the Internet is the place.
Most
people (me too) use Twitter for goofy stuff, Phatic function role in
communication (I know, Roman Jakobson's theory is dated, but it helps
my point here). That trivial, seemingly unimportant use of the
platform is so, so human. Until Twitter first appeared, edubloggers
were experts I profoundly admired and responded to in fairly formal
blog comments. Today, a few of those experts are friends I hold very
dear. How did that happen?
I
see the point that if we can discuss important social issues on
Twitter, we can discuss them on the blog. But why wouldn't the
reverse also apply? The idea that certain media (social networks or
good old letters) are a more appropriate means depending on the
message is worth exploring. There is a huge difference between
clicking a love button on Twitter or spelling out to the other person
that you love them. Those are choices. It is not the tool but how you
privately position yourself in front of it. Even before that, you may
have already decided how open or reserved you will be on Internet
mediated contexts. Through time that can change.
Common
sense and literacy can help you in online interactions, but
ultimately you decide how you involve yourself publicly.
Self-awareness (or lack of) about your drive is probably at the root
of understanding/misunderstanding intentions or telling honest people
from scammers online. It is a safety issue. How we go online is
probably what we should be talking about to our students. We will
never be able to test how much they learn from it. Learning proof is
probably not that important. Focus shift is. If we just focus on the
measurable what
and skip the subtleties of the elusive how
we construct our experiences and relationships online, do we qualify
for teaching students today?
Discussing
contents to guarantee our students secure an employment in the future
is far from enough. Most of our students are going to first meet
significant others on the Internet. We do not want them to fall prey
of catfish. We are not experts ourselves, we are learning. We need to
discover and accept our retroactive steps and feelings towards the
people we have friended online. Students google us. They crave for
our own stories. The answer to that is not a power point with safety
rules before you post. An honest account of what we believe are
possible ways of building relationships across continents is ever so
powerful. That's teaching, the kind of teaching we do when we simply
open up and share ourselves in casual conversational style.
Can
you do that? Lisa can.
***
Hey,
if I had answered the tweet, I probably wouldn't have written this
post. Ah... the carrousel a woman's mind can be while we stay behind
a screen voraciously reading while still silent.
I
find that fascinating.
Credit
where credit is due, i.e. inspiration attribution:
This
post was powered by the online presence of (the real) Dr Alec Couros,
whom I strongly recommend following. You can count on his answer if
you reach him with your thoughts anywhere he dwells online. Far from
closing your thinking with irrefutable conclusions, he'll provide
further food for thought, which can distract you from the job you
should be doing. Consider yourselves fairly warned.
Labels: alec couros, catfishing, edtech, education, literacy, online identity, twitter
