In our society, people are defined by many types of identities such as name, gender, job, nationality, etc… Without these identities, society will collapse. When the internet is born, a brand new world is introduced to people, a world in which everyone can express their thoughts and opinion anonymously. This quickly leads to problems such as the excessive amount of hate speech, rumors, and scams since people don’t need to take responsibility for their words and actions. This is why digital identity is important just like real-world identities. Digital identity is basically how you represent yourself on the internet. Whether you are a person, an organization, or a company, you always need information about yourself in order to interact with others. It can be basic information such as your name, age, and gender. It can also be complicated information such as your religion, values, and political status. It is what helps us to communicate with other people online and to help other people understand us better.

A personal account is our leisure space. We share moments with our friends and families, and our speech on this account would be more relaxing and careless. Professional accounts, on the other hand, are very formal in every way. For example, we want to demonstrate our professional skills in order to get a job. Personal and Professional approaches to digital identities are different but not isolated. Even though people tend to have different accounts for their personal and professional life, there is still some information that is the same for both accounts such as name and age, and others can easily find your personal life through your professional account.

Digital identity grants us safety on the internet by making everyone transparent online. It also makes public services much easier. Nowadays, we can do a lot of things such as pay bills, order on Amazon, and study online. These are all possible because of digital identity. The downside to this is that everything is so transparent that identity theft starts to become a problem. This is why people are now working on identity protection so we can protect our information.

Reference:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137405876_6

1. what does it mean to network using social media?

Ever since the idea of the internet came out, networking has been improving at a ridiculous speed. In the current state of the world, people can hardly live without a network. Internet/networks give us the ability to share information anywhere anytime. As the network develops, social media is born. The idea is simple, a platform or software that can help family, friends, or company to connect with each other and share their thoughts and emotions. However, such a simple idea brought enormous advantages and efficiency to our society. We no longer need to physically go to a place to have a meeting, nor do we need to wait weeks or months for mail to arrive at our families who live across the country. Therefore, a network is the soul of social media, without a network, social media wouldn’t exist.

2. How are we motivated to participate in networked publics?

Nowadays, there are plenty of different networked publics for various uses. For example, online teaching is a classic networked public. Right now, the world is heavily affected by Covid-19, therefore, online studying groups start to increase at a speed that is never seen before. People want to learn new knowledge while still keeping themselves safe, therefore these online teaching platforms started receiving a ridiculously large number of users that they never imagined before. Take zoom for example, in 2019 just before covid appeared, the average number of meeting users on zoom was only 10 million. But just 1 year after, the average number of users is around 300 million, 30 times more than before. Who would ever think a day like this would come? These networked publics brought people tremendous convenience and efficiency, therefore most people are willing to join more networked publics in the future. We are currently living in a world that is updating technology at an insane speed. Therefore we have to adapt to new things quickly and be prepared to live a fully online life in the future.

3. What are the risks & rewards of public communications?

Everything in this world is a double-edged sword. There are no things that only have advantages, the same for public communications. Even though they brought us convenience and efficiency, there are some risks that we have to be aware of. Since we are communicating with other people, we have to put our own personal information online. This results in identity theft and information leak. Nobody wants their credit card stolen, nor does anyone want their phone number leaked and get called by scammers 24/7. The convenience of accessing knowledge online is great, but we have to protect our own information before we do anything else.

References:

matthewwoodward.co.uk/work/zoom-user-statistics/#:~:text=Today%20Zoom%20averages%20300%20million,users%20(day)%20in%20meetings.