Being a tutor in the course Issues and Concepts in Digital Society this semester has reignited my long wish to operate a public social media account(s) and blog(s) once again, which I have tried a few times before but have always thought a not-so-easy task.
I do have a lot of opinions on many things and talk a lot to my close friends privately. Meanwhile, I am quite an introvert, not comfortable talking publicly, and a female who is doing research on the digital society, knowing that I might have to be careful about leaving digital traces. At the same time, I do prefer to show some aspects, not all aspects, to some people and hide other aspects from them. For instance, I recently broke my nose in a judo competition in Sheffield, a thing that I actually considered a glory and a memorable lesson that I would go through at some point in my judo life, but not a thing that I will be too keen to tell the whole world, especially to my families and supervisors.
Managing social media accounts and blogs in a digital world is less about presenting a self or selves on a stage than curating an exhibition. Digital content is created as a way to communicate with the public and unknown audiences, or maybe there will not be any at all, and the digital traces will thereafter be left in a way that we might have little control over them once being spread online. Based on these reasons, I have been very cautious about what I should say online.
In addition, it is slightly tricky to decide what to present on which platforms. For this aspect, it is more like presenting different selves to different audiences, but one has to do it in ways that digital platforms afford you. Take Twitter as an instance. Many academic workers in the English-speaking world run a Twitter account, a winner-takes-it-all effect of social media. However, it seems that users have few privacy options on Twitter — they cannot easily select who they want to share certain content with or not to show their following and followed lists. In the case of Facebook, there are a lot more Taiwanese users on it than on other social media. Although Facebook does provide users to group friends (audiences/readers, whatever you like to call them), because most users have only one Facebook account and are not too keen to group their friends and maintain different identities (the best I can do is group my Facebook friends into acquaintances and friends), occasionally, there could be clashes of one’s different performative identities. Nonetheless, t is often difficult to leave a social media platform or switch from one to another because all the networks a user already build on one platform. Thus, even if there has been a storm occurring on Twitter because of the new owner, many users have not chosen to leave.
Anyway, let me just start to operate my public social media accounts(s_ and blog(s), an experiment that allows me to engage in social issues and public communication and to explore myself.