Screening of digital identities

Since beginning my Digital Identities course at Aarhus University, I’ve found myself considering my activities on the social media platforms a lot more than before. Every time I log on to one of my accounts I look at the posts and updates from my friends with my mind on what they are posting and why. With my close friends I find myself considering how their digital identities are different from their real life identities. It is clear, that some of them only posts certain things and have a sort of a theme in their post on for instance Instagram. Some of them have kind of a “fitness” profile and others have a theme of pictures about their lives. Loooking at that I wonder why they choose that, because even though the one with the fitness profile do care a lot about health, it is not the most dominant thing in her life, so I wonder why she’s chosen that.

During Facebook’s first years a lot of focus was put on to the privacy of it. A lot of people warned about the fact that using Facebook and posting certain things could lead to companies not wanting to hire you. Drunken pictures and status updates about very personal things should not be online where everybody could see it. This might have affected the way people from the first Facebook generation use the social medias and screen what they post and make a part of their digital identity.

With two younger cousins at the age of 14 and 15 it is clear to me that a screening process about their posts and updates do not exist. They update about broken hearts and losing their best friend to someone else. Maybe this happens because they are a different generation, a generation that doesn’t remember a time without Facebook, or maybe it is because they aren’t considering what consequences their digital life can have on the long term – if any. Because as the social media platforms develop and become a part of everyday life and everyone is adapting to the digital life and world, the consequences, if there has ever been such consequences, might not be very high. A digital generation grows up, and as I see it, their digital identity is very close to their real life identity. They post and update more frequently and they post and update more personal things. It is yet to be seen if a screening process about their posts will occur later in their life, and their digital identity at that point will differ from their real life identity. But right now I see those two identities very intertwined.