Blog Post #2 – What Does My Digital Identity Look Like?

What is a digital identity?

Firstly, I want to share here my digital identity activity that I wrote up for the class discussion since it relates quite a bit to this question:
“It’s been very interesting to read everyone’s digital identity activities over the week. I have found a lot of the posts to be pretty insightful, coming at the topic in a way that I hadn’t considered and making insightful connections that were really useful to expanding my understanding. I hope to provide some insight of my own as I discuss the aspects of digital identity here that I was thinking about on my first reflection with the prompt. For me, digital identity is something that is interesting in the subtle ways in which how we construct and perform it differs from how we construct and perform our in-person identities. While there are a lot of similarities, I think that there is often a big difference in the role that intentionality plays when we are considering these identities. When we consider aspects of identity that a person may express in real life, such as how they dress or the language they use, these are certainly very important markers of identity, but the fact remains that while we do make these choices in how we do these things, we do not get the choice in whether or not we do them at all. We must get dressed in some manner in order to go out into the world, and we must make use of some kind of language in order to interact with it. In this sense, these compelling forces obscure the intentionality that we have when making these choices, because the choice to simply not  do them is not one that is available to us. In contrast, online identity is one that we are (typically) free to choose all aspects of; we can choose the aesthetics of our digital profiles in nearly every manner, including whether we want to make one at all. Thus, I think that the creation of digital identity is just as important as the ways and places in which we choose not to create digital identity. For example, those who have expressed concerns about privacy choosing not to with social networking sites that they have deemed as too public or untrustworthy, or for choosing not to engage with a certain digital network due to its reputation or use. Personally, I have chosen not to use Facebook for privacy reasons, and when I was younger and Snapchat was a bigger part of the lives of my peers, I would decline their requests that I start using the app and send messages with them since i generally thought that its was a little silly to be invested in the “streaks” that the app kept track of that were the driving force behind my friends asking me to get on the app. I think that these notable exclusions are just as relevant to my digital identity and the way that it is constructed as many of the inclusions of ways in which I did actively construct my digital identity. 

On a different note, when we are constructing an identity online, it is very often that we have the ability to partially or fully shroud ourselves in anonymity in a way that is difficult to do in real life. This allows people to construct identities that are very different from how they are in real life, but nonetheless still genuinely them. Let’s examine the case of LGBTQ+ people for example. When I was younger and living in Alberta I didn’t feel comfortable being out in my day to day life, but still wanted to express that aspect of myself. The anonymity of social media sites like twitter or instagram allowed me to celebrate those parts of myself in a manner that is entirely distinct from my real life performance of my identity, yet both were certainly mine. In this sense, both this digital persona and my real life persona were controlled and uncontrolled in their presentations of myself. In my real life I could talk about my personal life without much care for controlling the privacy of my identity, i.e. who I was, where I lived, etc, since that was already obvious to the people that I was interacting with, while I kept the parts of my life I was ready to share in a way that was connected to my real life controlled. On the flip side, I was able to freely discuss that aspect of myself online under the cover of anonymity, but there I had to be careful to keep any details about my real life private.”

To summarize some of the ideas that I was discussion above, I view digital identity as something that is fluid and multiple, where many different digital identities can exist for one person at once; the most obvious example of this is the differences between the personal digital identity and the professional digital identity, which is something that will be further discussed below. 

However, there exists another reading of the term “identity,” one which shifts away from the concept of the identity in the sociological sense, and more towards the digital identity as an identifier of a specific real world person. Operating under this definition, I would tend to consider digital identity as the collection of all things that someone does or has attached to them online that can be considered a part of their person or used to identify them. In this case, someone’s data becomes a much larger part of their identity, as it has the potential to identify in ways that are often unexpected, such as through search history or other similar trends in the data that are easy for computers to discern and identify people with, but impossible for humans. Overall, digital identity is a concept that is hard to pin down due to how much its definition depends on the specific context in which it is being applied. 

How do personal versus professional approaches to digital identity affect social media use?

As discussed in my last blog post, there are significant changes to the social scripts that are used when using social media as a professional networking tool vs as a personal tool. Additionally, as discussed above, some professional social media networking may be considered less as a choice that people make actively and more and more as a requirement for employment as time goes on. Thus, it often falls into the compulsory category I laid out earlier, and as such, has somewhat less influence on the creation of our digital identities as identity in the sociological sense. For me, I have a linkedin and indeed account, both of which are digital platforms meant to support those in the professional world, but I do not consider them as very core to my personal identity, even if I have dressed them in ways that identify them as mine. This is because I have been required to make use of these programs in the past when pursuing employment opportunities. These are very manicured and controlled, but not in a way in which they are meant to express who I am, my identity, but rather who I am as a worker, as someone who can help to raise productivity and bring in profit for potential employers. As discussed above, personal use of social media can be done in a way that is similarly managed down to the last detail, but in a way that is meant to be identity affirming. This identity affirming personal use can be very self directed under the cover of anonymity, or more performative, as described by Spracklen in the chapter on Social-Media and Identity Making.

How do digital identities converge in networked publics – what are the impacts and benefits?

Digital identities can converge in ways that are both positive and negative. Some people choose to try to keep their business networks and their personal networks separate, as they want to keep their manicured perfect business persona separate from their more genuine digital connections, while others may choose to use their personal networks to promote their business. I see the latter most often when the business in question is one owned by the individual that is integrating it in some manner into their personal networks; artists are a great example of this. I have friends who do art as a career, and they find it very fulfilling, affirming, and exciting to be sharing their professional works with friends, who likewise seem to enjoy being on the receiving end of these promotions for these works of art. However, I think that for a lot of people, professional digital identity is something that they would like to keep separate. Personally, I am one of these people. I think that under capitalism, many people do work that is unfulfilling, degrading, or otherwise alienating. As such, I make the active choice to keep my professional digital identity as far away from the identities that I have crafted that I see as a truer expression of myself. Personally, I hate that I must hide parts of myself that I would be otherwise embracing or celebrating in order to make myself more employable. 

Can a digital wallet provide trust in networked publics?

I think that digital wallets, much like any other kind or authentication service, work as a double edged sword. There are very important benefits to anonymity online, as I have discussed above, and I think that certifying all digital identities (identities in the sense of portfolios of identifying information and online profiles in this case) using practices like these hampers much if not all of those benefits. However, it is worth noting that this does mean that when people do act out in harmful ways that there can be consequences for that. This means that people can be more trusting in that the community can be protected from those that seek to cause them harm. However, I would argue that whatever trust is gained by turning online platforms into what amounts to digital versions of real life is lost by the course of action in the digital identifiers that were used to get there. People like me when I was younger and afraid to speak up for myself and be who I am would lose out on a place to explore those aspects that they may be afraid to discuss in a networked public in which they have their identity certified. I certainly think there are exceptions to this when not having these resources put into practice could result in grievous harm to people or communities, such as with the covid vaccination passes, but overall I think that unless otherwise necessary, it is best practice to avoid stripping out the potential for people to go about spaces anonymously.