Translator: Lam Nguyen Reviewer: Denise RQ What do your digital footprints say about you? What do I mean by digital footprint? I mean all the stuff that we leave online, the digital tracks and traces, the stuff that makes up other people's perception of who we are, as well as our own.
Some of those things are really visible, and some of them are really invisible: the things that you've watched, the trail of things you've watched on YouTube that recommends something else. Some of them are things like your search history, but lots of the things that we leave online is stuff that are entirely within our control and are about our own creative process. So I want you to start off by thinking about what the last thing that you shared online was.
This might've been two or three minutes ago, hours ago, or days ago. What was that last thing that you shared? It might have been something on Facebook, on Snapchat - I know I just protected Tweeter automatically because I'd like to be a little bit smug when I'm speaking - but what was that last thing?
What does that thing [say] about you? If someone's looking at that, what does that tell you? Does that tell them what you are or about your interests?
Maybe it says something that's really positive or quirky. So again, I'm being a bit smug, This is baking a bun. Maybe it shows that you've an interest, maybe it shows that you do a particular kind of job, maybe it shows a particular kind of hobby that you have, or something really positive you'd really want to show to the world.
So if someone looks at that, you'd think, "Brilliant. I recognize that person as myself. And I think that's what I'd like to portray to people.
" Maybe you're portraying different parts of yourself to different kinds of audiences, even having different rights by having different kinds of identities for different kinds of contexts. So you can present yourself in sort of on-stage ways and off-stage ways. Just being off-stage and coming on stage - It feels very relevant right now.
But sometimes you have to have different kinds of identities, and they don't always stay totally separate. In fact, some of the things you share online, maybe they're not presenting you exactly how you'd want to do it. So, this is my polite version of sharing something slightly inappropriate online.
This is my cat Godfrey. He's on Twitter and Instagram. Please don't judge me.
Or judge me. That's OK. You might be sharing stuff you don't really intend to get a wider airing.
Godfrey's not to embarrass, although I have to say I didn't ask his consent to use his image, which I really should've. But maybe something gets out of hand; maybe it goes to an audience you don't expect it to get to. Then your identity starts to be this slight model of things intended for different kinds of audiences.
You get this idea of context collapse where your friends, your colleagues, people who you run with, people who you'd create craft with maybe, all converge in the same space, they all start to see different parts of your identity. And that's quite challenging; and when you're sharing on social media, that's really likely to happen. Your parents might be on Facebook.
People you don't know might interact with people who you do know when you're sharing stuff in anonymous spaces. You have to be thinking about what that identity is projecting about you and what you want it to project about you. It's not about what you share and where you share it, it's also who you share it with; you can choose, but most of us don't choose to.
We've been doing some research with students at University of Edinburgh, and we've been asking them to tell us how they use social media, how they think about their identity online, and 61% of them very, very rarely check their privacy settings. And five percent of them have found something online they did not want to see. They thought it's been taken away, they didn't think, they posted it.
So privacy settings, who you share with, and the circles you share with, matter. You share to these networks, they share further on. You have control of that, but most of us choose not to exercise that.
And that's kind of interesting. So we have these footprints. We have these things that are visible and these other things that aren't.
We also create other people's footprints for them, but we don't always think about it that way. So we have in all these social media platforms the ability to tag people. That's great.
That's lovely. You can say you were all in the same place. It's really good until you turn down this one invitation to do something quite important, and someone tagged you in an event somewhere else.
That's not so great. Someone tagged you in a photo, and it's not a good photo, Sometimes it has a serious consequence; a lot of training teachers, particularly in the US, have found that pictures of them drinking - not drinking underage, just drinking in their 20s - have been enough to impact on their employment potential, because that's an image that employees don't want to have of them. Sometimes it's much less important than that; someone says, "You haven't got me at the right side," "I don't like that picture," "That picture is not very flattering.
" That matters too though; you have to respect people's wishes. We still try to figure out this etiquette about what we tag, what we share, how our digital footprints are constructed, and how we're constructed by other people every day. So again, when we did research about students, 11% of people said they had been tagged in an unwanted way in a photograph.
Eleven percent; that's a huge number. And again, thinking about that seriousness potentially - there're some professional bodies and things that from the moment that you start university, sometimes even before that, your presence online actually is part of your professional identity. Student nurses are asked from the day they start university to consider themselves a professional.
That is how they're supposed to present themselves online. That's a really big ask, I have to say. So, the stuff you're sharing now, the stuff you share everyday can have long-term consequences.
The thing is though that I'm sounding a bit scary; I love social media, I'm on all of the social media. If you Google me, you will find me all over the place. I totally love these things.
They are creative, fantastic tools. They are like a big, giant yarn shop for anonymity. And it's a huge suite of things that are creative, and wonderful, and create marvelous things.
I'm not going to dissuade you from getting that stuff up. There can be really good things about being present online. Again, with our students in the research, 16% of them had had approaches for jobs, for volunteering opportunities, because of having a presence online.
I've had professional opportunities because I shared cooking pictures. It can be really fantastic to build up your network. It's a really positive thing as long as you're being deliberative and thinking about what you're doing.
Because once something is out there, it's really hard to get it back. These things go out of hand, they grow, they network - you end up with this big tangle of things. If you want to take back a post: you might delete it in one place, it might've been copied to somewhere else.
If you want to get something removed, you might have to ask your friends to forget it was ever there, and to remove a screenshot of it, as well. It's not that easy to take stuff back once it's out there. It's not impossible.
The stuff I posted when I was a teenager online - just about young enough to expose the stuff online when I was a teenager - that has disappeared. Some of that I'm pleased about, are some of this I really missed. But you have to assume stuff will stick around a little bit.
And trying to get it back is difficult. So I want you to think ten years ahead. It's 2026.
I have no idea what state the world is in - especially after the last few weeks. Think ahead, it's 2026: what does the digital footprint of the stuff that you are leaving now say about you? Is it saying the right things?
Is that history of you? Because we will all have a history of us recorded in lots of different places. What does that say about you?
Is it what you want it to? And when you post something next time, I want you to think about that; about this thing I'm sharing, this post, this comment. It might be silly.
It doesn't have to be serious. Having a personality is 90% of what social media is about; being fun and lively is fine. But think about what you're creating.
You're creating something beautiful and complex, like this Dale Chihuly glass sculpture. Maybe you can't see everything; maybe a different audience see different things. But interesting, and complex, and a brilliant presentation of you - that's what we need to think about when you think about making a digital footprint for the future.
And I want you to think about that when you're thinking about how you deal with the stuff you don't want to stay online forever; just to be thinking about the long-term view of it. It might be ephemeral, it might stick around forever, but always to be thinking, "How do I make my digital footprint to say the right thing about me? ", and "How can I make that a choice that I've taken control of?
" Thank you.
