Your digital identity is how you choose to portray yourself online. What you like, post, and comment on are all representations of your digital identity. With that being said, it’s important that you take time to really consider how you truly want to be portrayed online. How would you want future employers to view you? We discussed in class about creating our own personal brands, and I truly believe that is important. Whatever we post online is creating a digital footprint, and even though we may delete something, that does not mean that it is necessarily gone off of the internet. So, it’s important that we post things that represent what we believe our personal brand to be. When people search your name online, what do you want to pop up? Personally, I haven’t even really thought of what my personal brand could be until learning how important it is through this week’s reading and class discussion. Whenever I post on social media, I always just ask myself, “Would I want my boss to see this?”. I have heard a lot of stories of people who post things in high school/college that come back to haunt them when they try to enter into a career, and I know that I would not want that to be me. So, we are constantly using the internet nowadays, which means we are constantly creating a digital footprint. With that in mind, it is important that we post things that highlight our personal brand, always keeping in mind that our digital identities can make or break our futures.
Image link: https://mychapterroom.com/blog/3-tips-protect-digital-footprints/
Kayla, well-written post! I agree that what you post is important to watch but I also think that it is very hard to manage your digital footprint at times because we can’t control what others post about us. I think it is important to manage what we want to be seen and be cautious and clear about what we say. As you said, even when things are deleted they are still out there forever, so especially now creating a positive digital footprint is very important.
Hi Kayla, I think your comment about how when a post is deleted that it really isn’t gone forever because posts are always stored somewhere and someone else could have saved your post without you realizing it because they could screen shotted it and saved it. This adds to the importance of ensuring what you post is something you’re ok with everyone seeing it because it could always be around and be brought up again in the future.