Digital Safety

In this digital age, social media has become extremely important in areas such as communications and careers. Although I’m not as deeply involved as I should be, I believe that, despite the widely known negatives, being a user of social media can greatly benefit everyone. However, if used wrong it can also greatly damage one’s reputation, career, and emotions. I’m still surprised, and maybe a little disappointed, that people are daring enough to post pictures of themselves in extremely degrading situations. It’s even worse when they’re proud of it. I was reminded of this reality from a video that my professor had showed me in class last week. Unfortunately, I can’t recall the title of the video, but it was simple; a man walked into an interview, falsely presented himself in a positive light to the interviewer who was checking his social media, and walked out of the interview completely oblivious to the fact that he would not be getting the job. The video itself was quite comedic, but sadly it was also a decent representation of unaware social media users.

“The internet offers companies a gold mine of information about potential hires” - Leslie Kwoh

Honestly I couldn’t have said it better myself.

There are several social media safety issues that people should be aware of. Here are some listed by Joe Ross:

Oversharing: A simple concept. Why share more than you need to? And to so many strangers? The more you share, the more information can be used against you. A few examples include identity theft and stalking.

Reputation: Many people are still unaware of the risks that a poor digital personality can cause. Jobs and colleges do look through digital profiles.

Cyber bullying: An increasing problem within social media. The feeling of being anonymous on the net boosts confidence and allows many people to act without restraint.

From my perspective, cyber bullying can also go hand in hand with trolls. Trolls are people who have nothing better to do with their lives other than instigate. They gain satisfaction and pleasure from causing emotional distress to others. I’m personally guilty of trolling in the past and I can honestly say, it’s a waste of time. I gained momentary shallow satisfaction. I realized it was worse than eating cookies or other baked goods.

Fortunately, Twitter is taking big steps to quell trolls by establishing a Twitter Trust & Safety Council. This council advocates self expression online, which is currently difficult due to trolls. Honestly, I’m skeptical about this because people have a right to say whatever they want, but I’m also interested in their possible solutions.

To end on a more positive note, I recently read a chapter from Untangling the Web by Steve Dembo and Adam Bellow. The chapter discusses several convenient tools for gathering and storing important information. The one that stood out most to me was social bookmarking, which is essentially tagging. As simple as it sounds, many people including myself rarely use this feature. I recently used it and found it to be useful and will probably continue to use it in the future. The book discusses several tools such as Diigo, a popular bookmarking site that continues to update, and EduClipper, also a bookmarking site but mainly for classroom use. It is possible to use Diigo in an academic environment as well due to its networking capabilities. Since this tool is 100% online, it is much more convenient to store bookmarks this way. Once your Diigo account is created, you can access your bookmarks from anywhere. Lastly, it's also possible to bookmark privately, meaning Diigo can be used both personally and publicly.