EDCI338

PLN, Public Communications & Digital Identity

Networking Using Social Media

Photo Credits, Malcolm Owen

Social media networking entails the process with which individuals build and sustain social and economic relations using technology. For this to occur, social media platforms such as Twitter, Telegram and Facebook since they enable individuals and corporations to interact with each other easily. This way, efficient relationships are built enabling smooth sharing of ideas, messages and information (Psychology Today, 2021).

Participating in Networked Publics

The greatest motivations towards social media networks are normally social and financial. For example, family members that are far apart use social media to keep in touch. Furthermore, people often connect with others who are often strangers but share similar interests through the use of lists, groups, channels and even hashtags. Economically, marketers use social media as a means of building brand awareness as well as sustaining customer loyalty to their brands. This is mainly because social media makes brands more visible to current customers besides attracting new customers to the company.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Networking

Advantages of social media networking include the fact that family members and friends who have no physical access to each other can always communicate. Moreover, it connects individuals with strangers who share similar interests hence creating new partnerships. For corporations, new customers are easily attained. However, social networking comes with a number of loopholes including the fact that misinformation is rapidly spread across platforms. Such cases normally cause personal and brand image distortion. Additionally, creation and sustenance of a company’s image online can take time and also be costly.

Digital Identity

Photo Credits; International Banker

Digital Identity is a combination of information about an individual which are in digital forms. Such information is mainly attained through a person’s digital activities such as facebook likes and retweets in addition to personal attributes such as bank details and email address. Such information is normally used by computer systems to identify foreign agents since identify can be defined as a number of attributes that can be used to define a certain entity (Rannenberg, 2011).

Personal Vs Professional Digital Identity

Being an active user of social media services, there emerges a need for a balance between an individual’s personal and professional expectations. This is mainly because despite most employers being much interested employees’ skillset, they are gradually considering individual social skills and activities before offering job opportunities. This means that, even at the personal level, prospective employees need to stay vigilant and considerate of the comments and responses they post online in order to safeguard their professional image. Furthermore, individuals employed for online marketing programs have been noted to run multiple accounts catering for both personal and professional reasons. This means that such individuals need to be careful whenever posting in order to avoid the possibility of posting personal issues on professional platforms. Generally, personal versus professional approaches to digital ID has encouraged cautious use of social media by various individuals.

Impact of Digital ID’s in Networked Publics

Personally, I really feel like digital Identities on public online spaces are a silent encroachment to privacy. This is mainly because in most cases, the persistence displayed by some sites means that whatever one says today can be sought for and be available even after several decades later. Furthermore, searchability noted in various sites means that anyone can be located at any particular time and most probably be found. Replicability is also quite common in social media whereby posts and media can be copied and pasted across various platforms leading to high chances of misinterpretation. Eventually, the original owner takes all the blame. With such cases being common, repercussions include employees losing jobs for insulting others online or after posting date pictures online after calling in sick.

References

Psychology Today. Social Networking. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/social-networking

Rannenberg, K. (2011). “ISO/IEC 24760-1: A framework for identity management – Part 1: Terminology and concepts”. ISO. Retrieved 2015-12-05.

6 Comments

  1. violet

    Hi Alan, I really like that you mention misinformation which I didn’t mention in my post. It makes me think about the photoshop skills that we can use to edit the photos and even make some fake photos to transfer the fake information. It is harder and harder for the public to distinguish what is true and what should people believe. I noticed that some misinformation is significantly affecting the public, such as fake news, once people receive the fake news, it is hard to let people believe the news is fake.
    I don’t know have you thought about how to help the public distinguish the misinformation?

    • alanbuzy

      Hello, thank you for the feedback.

      I think the best way to combat misinformation is for everyone to ensure that he/she has multiple sources of information. This is mainly because most inaccuracies occur when information consumers believe in a story as soon as they read it. Having various information sources, therefore, ensures that a reader goes through different pieces about a particular story before making judgement. Moreover, with this strategy it is important to understand that famous reporting platforms aren’t automatically honest sources.

  2. sail0603

    Hi Alan, I agree with your perspective of social media network . I also think it has both advantages and disadvantages. As you said, social media network can promote the relationship between people, so that people who haven’t contacted for a long time can be better connected. It brings convenience to people, and I agree with you that the company will bring new customers. But in my opinion, sometimes the risk of social media network is lagger than its own benefits. The risk is that personal information may not be safe. For example, we can get people’s names, ages, even phone numbers and ID numbers through social media networks. These may lead to those illegal elements stealing personal information.The consequences will be particularly serious. This is my own perspective of social media network.
    If you like, you can go to my blog to see some of my ideas. I’m looking forward to your message.

    • alanbuzy

      Hello Sail, your argument is quite factual. Social media has several advantages but as you just mentioned, there are quite a number of loopholes with it. Private information is largely at risk for example sites which use cookies can easily track your location when you are in use of its contents. But basically, it is very difficult to safeguard privacy online. I agree with you.

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