The challenge of defining our digital identity on social media platforms

People define, express, and represent themselves through their profiles, interactions, relationships, and their networks online. In other words, users’ online activities form their digital identities. Social media makes new opportunities and challenges related to the digital identities of users either professional or personal. The professional identity of an individual on a social media platform means representations of the professional activities, affiliations and work-related norms that a person presents. Personal identity, on the other hand, is any activities, opinions or relationships that represent a person beyond their professional activities. However, there is not always a clear separation between professional and personal identities on social media platforms. For example, Twitter is a social media platform used widely among educators. It is also an important communication channel for journalists and politicians. But how do these people use Twitter and how do they represent themselves? Do their profiles and activities on Twitter reflect their personal or professional identities? How do they separate the representations of their professional and personal identities? Are they recognised as they wanted to be identified? How do their digital identities affect their audience and what they learn and grasp from their accounts? There are several important questions in this context to be addressed.

Bossio and Sacco [1] discuss that representing personal and professional identities online might be especially difficult for journalists. They interviewed 30 journalists to analyse how they negotiate representations of their professional and personal identities on social media platforms. Their results show that journalists present their identities on social media in three different ways:

a) creating public and professional accounts and having secondary, private accounts that are only accessible to personal networks,

b) maintaining public accounts dedicated to professional activities, and

c) merging professional and personal identities on publically available accounts [1].

In an interesting study, Carpenter et al. analyzed profiles and tweets from K-12 teacher Twitter accounts (n = 33,184) to investigate how the accounts were used for personal and professional purposes [2]. The analysis revealed that the majority of the teacher Twitter profiles distanced professional identities from personal beliefs or affiliations. Carpenter et al. [2] discuss that teachers separate aspects of their personal identities that they perceive as potentially having positive professional impacts (i.e., family roles) from aspects that could be more controversial (i.e., religious or political affiliation). However, the lack of personal representations could restrict teachers’ interactions and the networks they develop with other educators on Twitter and it may consequently restrict the students’ benefits [2].

Here I would like to continue with a reflection on my personal experience regarding using Twitter for professional activities. I always wanted to actively maintain my Twitter profile and build a space where I could communicate with other people in the field and learn from the current state of the art in usable privacy and security research. Despite my initial motivation I never succeeded and I found it less straightforward than what it looked like at the beginning. I was weighing two options as two separate potential directions to select:

1- making a complete separation between professional and personal activities (e.g. just tweet, retweet, and like the tweets related to my work),

2- having a combination of both representations of my professional and personal identities in my profile and through my activities on Twitter.

I knew that there would be another option of making two different accounts and devoting each to representing either my professional or personal identity. Nonetheless, having two separate accounts would be too much for me to handle and it might end up in at least one inactive account.

Another problem was related to the language. I have my colleagues following me on Twitter. At the same time, I follow some of my Persian friends and have them as my followers. When they like Persian tweets I see it in my timeline and sometimes I am intrigued to like those tweets. But if I like a Persian tweet it may appear in my colleagues’ timelines and they may find it irrelevant and annoying.

Further, I found it drastically hard to make a separation between the professional and personal representation of myself. If others with whom you are communicating (e.g. your followers and whom you follow) do not make a distinction between personal and professional identities you will be affected as well. People whom I followed were retweeting and liking tweets in different contexts. When surfing through my timeline on Twitter I could see ranges of different tweets and I was unintentionally reacting to some. 

I was also to some extent concerned about my privacy and what others could learn about me and my opinions and attitudes on different matters from the tweets I like. On Twitter, if your account is public everyone can see the tweets you like and I assume it can tell a long story about the person holding the account. I have seen some people announcing that their opinions on Twitter do not represent their employer’s opinions (i.e. their tweets are their own) or their thumbs up for tweets do not mean endorsement. But we like it or not, people are entitled to interpret themselves what an action means. All of these activities form our digital identity whether we mean it or not. 

References:

[1]. Bossio, D., & Sacco, V. (2017). From “selfies” to breaking tweets: How journalists negotiate personal and professional identity on social media. Journalism practice, 11(5), 527-543.

[2]. Carpenter, J. P., Kimmons, R., Short, C. R., Clements, K., & Staples, M. E. (2019). Teacher identity and crossing the professional-personal divide on Twitter. Teaching and teacher education, 81, 1-12.