I think those social media applications can connect people from all over the world, just like a net. Social media helps us to meet all kinds of people from different cultures all over the world. Different people have different opinions about the same things, so we can learn a lot from social media that we can’t learn from textbooks. Social media is a place where we can share interesting things that can inspire us to live a good life and send positive energy. Also, we can let our friends who we don’t contact often know what we are up to and keep in touch. Through the dynamics we post, others on social media can easily get to know each other and maintain the friendship, regardless of time or place. Finally, your talent can be appreciated and recognized on social media. When you sing a song and share it on social media, you can receive compliments and attention, which will help you find confidence. Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages. First, your privacy will be exposed. All the traces you leave on social media will be seen, such as your love history, life path personal privacy, etc., and it will be easy to encounter flesh search and cyberbullying.

Literally, digital identity is the electronic version of our identity, our identity on the web. I agree with one of the articles that say that there are all kinds of ads pushed to us online, but they are all very appropriate to our recent needs. For example, if we search for an item in a search engine, we immediately see ads popping up for that item that is similar or more suited to our aesthetics and needs. Maybe those ads are pushing us the right things based on our identity on the web, through big data, so that we can achieve some win-win benefits. I think personal approaches to digital identity are more private and personal. Maybe it’s just limited to your friends and family. Sharing your life on a daily basis. However, professional approaches to digital identity are a bit more professional. It is a little bit broader in scope. For example, it will cover more specialized areas, and update useful information based on real-time news. Or job search information, and information that you want to be found by others to gain attention. In the public network, we publish some information, we hope more people can see, the public network is a very good platform. However, sometimes it will attract a lot of people’s comments, some are very bad comments, cyber violence. So, this digital identity has both advantages and disadvantages, it depends on how we, as users, want to use them.

References

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/learning-network-age/0/steps/24644

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3559/3131

https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/networked

I am Caroline, I am a forth year Applied Linguistics student. I am from China, Beijing. My native language is Mandarin. In my leisure time, I like to learn different languages, so I can speak English, Japanese and Korean. I am currently in Vancouver right now and I will be moved to Victoria this weekend. I usually like to watch variety TV shows and enjoy browsing social media accounts and that’s the reason I take this course. Also, my major is about teaching languages, so I would like to learn how social media can be connect with teaching. I have taken other EDCI courses before and I really enjoyed it. There are so many fun thing to explore. I like to experiment with new things. I also enjoy editing videos. If there is some editing of videos or something like that in teamwork you can leave it to me. I’m looking forward to this class. 🙂