I forgot to blog last week... but the articles we read were (of course) right up my alley.
I have been on twitter since 2008, under the name I use for everything online, bunnycaper. I was public and open and didn't think of people outside of my circle reading my thoughts, because I guess I didn't spend a lot of time reading through tweets of people I didn't know and I projected that belief to others, I guess. I sent my twitter to private a few years ago so only people that I approved could follow me, and started another account for personal and school.
This was ok for a while: adult learning-related things were posted to one account and TV/music/all the hilarious things I say to another. It felt like I was splitting myself in two. Like the Marwick and boyd article, I was having a hard time maintaining public and private information so I stopped using the (public) school account and switched my personal account from private to public.
Right before I read this article, I began to have similar thoughts about authenticity and self-presentation on my own. Was I really being myself online, when I filtered my thoughts to different places with different settings? After all, my personal account was used less and less for weird personal rants--I was learning to present myself in a certain way and filter the comments I didn't want anyone to read. I felt like my social media usage was maturing, and I was growing up, but there was some self-censorship going on. After reading this article and seeing what I was really doing... I am ok with self-censorship. I don't think you need to post everything you are thinking all the time. I guess I was figuring out how to balance.
I think "I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately" is going to be one article I come back to repeatedly to analyze & get deeper insight into my own social media usage.
Oh yeah, self-censorship is a huge part of having any kind of social media account. Unless it's photos of my foster cat, I never censor myself in that regard! Ha ha ha. :)
ReplyDeleteMelissa - I love boyd and Marwick too and agree their stuff is worth many readings...Your post also made me think about Michelson a bit: how unspoken class-bound (or Discourse bound) commonsense works to shape our ideas, our interpretations of things and even our understanding of self. While I agree that some of this is maturing (after all, this is what apprenticing into a disciplinary discourse is all about) in some other contexts it might also be self-negating (think: Educating Rita), yes? Maybe having split selves is OK? Or maybe integrity is about realizing that performing identity is a co-production of our selves and the context we are in? Maybe integrity has to do with knowing and being true to our center whilst we perform our many selves? (I have no idea what I'm talking about right now; jet lag has taken control of my mouth....:) But great post, Melissa!!!
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