Picture
taken by Jonathan Acuña at Musée d’Ordsay, Paris, France (2019)
The Handling
of Online Selves
Beware of the
effects when they collide!
By
Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
|
|
Head
of Curriculum Development
Academic
Department
Centro
Cultural Costarricense-Norteamericano
|
Senior Language Professor
School of English
Faculty
of Social Sciences
Universidad
Latina de Costa Rica
|
Sunday, July 26, 2020
Post
351
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|
Opinion Prompt
Regarding Online Identity
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What questions does this pose for you, your family,
friends, or colleagues on their online identities?
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Think for a moment on your family
members, your group of friends, the troop of colleagues of yours, and even
yourself. How is it that all these people, including you, project who they are
when they are online? How do they represent themselves online? How is each one
of them perceived by others in this virtual environment. If communication is
disembodied in social media, how does each user in the groups above handle
their online self?
Your dear ones’ selves must find their
space in social media as well as yours. We should assume that everyone is the
warder of their online persona. The fact is that people in your
professional or personal networks may not be aware of the seeds of dire
repercussions when these two networks come together as one. People’s postings on
social media may be deemed to be unsuitable, improper, impolite, and
sacrilegious depending on who is reading or viewing them. This rises ethical
issues on both sides of the spectrum that user’s online selves do not know how
to cope with.
At one education institution I work
for, a particular situation happened unwilfully several years ago. A teacher of
ours, who had a YouTube channel where age inappropriate content of his
authorship was uploaded regularly, was in charge of teen groups. In the eyes of
the school administration this posed an ethical problem because it was then
thought, “what happens if parents or their children get to watch the content of
his puppet theater? And what if they discover that all this is the production
of their kids’ instructor?” Was this teacher’s wrongdoing in the eyes of
administration blameworthy? The fact is that his personal, professional, and
hobby persona had collided, and, according to his detractors, his theatrical
work online could damage the institution’s reputation.
My own children, my colleagues,
friends, and basically anyone build their online identity as if they were in
the real world. The lesson learned from the collision of online selves and the
puppet theater of one of our teachers brings several morals everyone has to
apply while their online personas are present in their social media sites: 1)
The language we choose to use in our virtual lives can be amply criticized depending
on who we are in the eyes of others; 2) the imagery attached to our personal
postings is not separated from what we do professionally; 3) whatever is
present in our social media profiles is used by visitors to construct the image
they have of ours; and 4) if no niche knowledge is contributed, we are spiteful
influencers that just intend to corrupt other people’s mind.
Based on what has been stated here,
your family members, your group of friends, the troop of colleagues of yours,
and even yourself “embody” different types of personas. At times, your
family/friends-driven persona is present while interacting with them, e.g., on
WhatsApp. Then your professional self manifests when you give your specialist
opinion regarding the latest finance report in the office through the office
Google Hangouts chat. And some other times your hobby persona shares with the
world your artistic self in painting, design, photography, memes, and the like
on a WordPress blog. The problem is not the co-existence of all these selves;
trouble arises when one cannot be differentiated from the other(s).
The Handling of Online Selves by Jonathan Acuña on Scribd
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