Prevention, Privacy, & Curating a Public Image
Even though I am of the era of digital natives, I have always been very careful about my online presence and the privacy settings I engage with on social media. Before starting grad school, I didn't have a public blog, website, or a Twitter account. Not only did I not find a use for them, but I also didn't like the idea of the whole world knowing my personal business - I still don't. Especially as a public school teacher - constantly under the scrutiny of parents, administration, and students - I despise the idea of having my name tied to something that someone from my school community could have a problem with thereby putting my career at risk. So now that I have a more public image, I am more aware than ever of my privacy rights. My Facebook profile is locked down hard, my Twitter account only has my first name, last initial, and handle. The resume section of my website omits my phone number and address. My blog only has my first name written on my blog and my last name associated with it, but nothing else personal. My NLS is completely privatized and invite only. My picture is prominent on all of these sites, but my image is completely clean and professional. These were my own personal concerns and my way of dealing with them, but the other thing that concerns me around privacy is helping my students to understand the importance of privacy.
I see first-hand that this upcoming generation uses social media as a way to hang out and socialize with one another. It's a playground for them, and they often don't consider their written words to be detrimental to themselves or others. They publicize their every action and thought, and in doing so can find themselves in bullying situations or worse. In a previous post, I talked a lot about coaching our youth about what kinds of things are considered private versus public and providing them with proper outlets to vent versus posting publicly. This is something that I still consider to be the utmost important aspect of helping our next generations be responsible digital citizens.
The first problem of being allowed to just let every thought flow from your mind out into the universe is one that has annoyed me the hardest. I am a private person by nature, and prefer to keep my thoughts to myself, so it has always been a little bit maddening for me to slog through all of my friends "statuses" about the reason they decided to drink a coke instead of a pepsi or how much they love their significant other, or some other trivial sentence of their choice. For me, these statuses have no impact on my life. For my students, these stream of conscious thoughts have huge amounts of impact in terms of confidence, popularity, and acceptance. Students can lift each other up and push each other down with their words on social media. A lot of students use social media as a public journal to share their frustrations with each other and their circumstances and this leads to so many instances of cyber bullying. To solve this issue, I have coached a lot of students on what the difference is between private and public thinking, as well as helped students find alternatives for writing about their frustrations and everyday occurrences that matter to them, but not always to everyone else. One of those ways of teaching them has been introducing them to blogging. Students seem to really latch onto this for a variety of reasons. Whatever their need, I always show them the public versus private features and coach them on what is appropriate for the public versus the private audience. Students love this, because it gives them their own place to customize and write whatever they want, gather followers authentically, and provide intention behind their thoughts (as other people have to intentionally visit their site because of their interest in it to read their thoughts and work as opposed to just randomly seeing it in a public stream like Facebook). Students don't have to switch digital platforms when they want to rant or get frustrations out that may not be appropriate to a public audience, and can choose to select the option of private viewing only (so that only they can see it, like a journal).
Another way to combat some of the tensions of social media is to disconnect from social media for a set amount of time. Find time to enjoy a conversation with a stranger, to stop and watch the clouds, to get out and play, to sit somewhere and enjoy the atmosphere around you, to hang out with others. The options are limitless, but the point is to be doing things with others or find time to feel comfortable doing something alone without resorting to pulling out your phone, tablet, or laptop.