Digital Presence Guide

Most of us already have some version of a digital identity, or even multiple digital identities, based on the different platforms and tools we use, as well as the different roles we occupy. For example, if you use multiple social media platforms, you may use them in different ways, to communicate or collaborate with different people or for different purposes. Some people use Instagram just with their friends, some people use Facebook just for work or community organizing, some people have identities tied to commenting on Reddit or YouTube, and many academics use Twitter to share research and connect with colleagues. Even your different email accounts can have different identities: you are probably not going to sign an email to a friend from your personal account “Kind regards,” but you might to a prof from your university account. In other words, your different identities are often different networks of people, and there are sometimes different norms for each of those spaces. 

Understanding how and why you use some tools and not others, and what the reasons for the norms you have are, can help you as you initiate or continue to develop your own digital identities, especially in a professional or change-making capacity. A lot of this may be intuitive, or already established for you, but if you aren’t sure, you can ask yourself a few questions about each tool you use: 

• What does your posting behaviour (e.g., content, frequency, commenting behaviour) tell you about who you are in a particular space? What kind of response or audience do you expect to engage with given that behaviour?
• Are you a lurker (almost never commenting or liking) or a superuser? 
• Which accounts are private and which are public, and why? For example, LinkedIn is a very public platform with a somewhat narrow purpose in terms of career networking and development, but you might be part of a private Facebook group tied to personal things that you wouldn’t want public. Importantly, the boundary between what is private versus what is public is important both for your own well-being but also because any active public account can be searched for online, and may also be permanent.

In the context of the MACAL program, understanding your digital identities is helpful as you assess how connected (or not) you want these different versions of yourself to be and to your work in the program as both a student and a professional. 

• Do you want to share and promote your blog posts on Twitter (or whatever platforms you use)? 
• Will it be helpful to have a Facebook group for you and your peers, and what will the agreed upon norms be for such a space? What will you do if any peers abstain from certain platforms? 
• What responsibilities or obligations (if any) do your digital identities have? (For example, if you moderate a blog, you will have to vet comments before they can be posted).

As your digital identity tied to climate leadership develops, whether exclusively on your blog and in the program, or expands outward into business, activist, media or other networks, establishing your voice and point of view will further shape how you use digital tools such as social media. And if you don’t know yet your point of view, consider the things you are interested in, the things you write about, and the things or people you fight for. They will tell you the story of your voice; you don’t have to work on those things exclusively, but understanding them will help you make informed choices about where and what to post, for example.

With so much at your fingertips, the benefits of developing a strong professional digital identity tied to your work in climate action are significant. Whether it’s establishing your voice in networks in which you’d like to work (or continue to work) through creating a distinct profile on something like LinkedIn, or by becoming a part of organizing efforts that take place online as much activism and social change does today, your online presence can help shape not just your career, but the future as well. Numerous tools make it easier to collaborate (e.g., G-Suite tools and other cloud-based programs), communicate quickly (e.g., WhatsApp, Slack), self-publish (e.g., Medium, WordPress, Squarespace, etc.) and project manage (e.g., Trello, Asana, etc.).

The benefits to developing your online presence aren’t just for you, however. By sharing your work and yourself online in the capacity of a climate leader and educator, you produce resources that can be accessed widely and made available to more people as needed. By working with open learning and creating open education resources, your work helps to democratize education, making it more available to more learners. The climate crisis is a wicked problem–complex, with no easy solutions, and multiple ways of understanding it–and requires all hands on deck. Importantly, in producing open content, you model leadership premised on collaboration and sharing, i.e., the understanding that we need to and can work together using the tools at our disposal to respond to the crisis. 

Further reading and resources: 

• Northeastern University provides a quick and dirty introduction to open learning concepts and tools.
• Similarly, open education resources help make learning more accessible and affordable

Online safety is a broad category that helps us think about the risks of being online and using digital technologies, while emphasizing tools and strategies for minimizing such risks. Being highly connected online comes with challenges and sometimes even threats, from increased exposure to sometimes unpredictable (and even aggressive or violent) audiences or publics which can result in online harassment, to creating content that can remain online forever and exceed our capacity to control (as when something goes viral), to concerns about privacy and security of our data, for example. By virtue of many of our tools being owned by private companies like Facebook and Twitter, we cannot eliminate all of these risks as we often don’t have the power to change the way such platforms operate; however, there are ways to mitigate against such risks.

Everything you do online leaves a trace in the form of data (sometimes called a digital footprint) that can be used and sold, ideally under circumstances of informed consent. Digital privacy is an “expectation of privacy unless the user has given consent that includes an awareness of the risks associated with online services, and individual control over the collection, distribution and retention of personal information” (Robertson and Muirhead, 2018). While the latter is specifically about data, digital privacy is also about participation in online spaces in ways that attend to a person’s need for privacy and boundaries in order to take care of themselves and their kin. This means cultivating awareness about the ways in which digital technology like video conferencing impact our learning communities, and our work/home/life spaces, which especially as a result of the pandemic have become increasingly public spaces. If you have concerns about the requests made in your courses, talk with your instructors. 

Further resources

• A recent talk on digital privacy by Dr. Bill Muirhead and Dr. Lorayne Robinson on at the RRU 2021 MALAT Virtual Symposium

Online harassment is not a new phenomenon. In fact, according to a recent Pew report 4/10 Americans have experienced online harassment in some form or another, which includes things such as verbal harassment on social media, trolling, and even at times death threats, among other things. Numerous factors impact both the likelihood of experiencing harassment as well as the severity of the harassment, including race, gender, religion, disability, sexuality, and even field of study. Writing publicly about climate change and climate justice, for example, can attract the ire of climate deniers and is a genuine concern for people publishing on the topic. For this reason, there are a few recommendations for how to keep yourself safer online: 

• Improved security of your online presence and devices
  • Two-step verification
  • Properly secure passwords (e.g., you can use digital password keepers, passwords should be complex using numbers, letters, and symbols where appropriate)
  • Never duplicating passwords across accounts (this is made easier by using a password keeper) 

• Understand the risks of being public online, and have a plan in place in case you are the target of online harassment
  • You will be able to choose to moderate or leave open commenting on your blog. Each comes with different advantages and disadvantages (which will be discussed in CALS 501), and understanding what works best for you will be helpful. 
  • Before deleting evidence of harassment (e.g., deleting a thread on Twitter), be sure to take screenshots and document everything. Store any evidence in an easy to manage folder. 
  • Harassment can be and usually is minor, but if it escalates, it is helpful (and common) to have peers, family, or friends also document any public harassment so that you can remove yourself from it. There are also outside resources available to support this kind of action of collecting digital evidence (embed link: https://bcsth.ca/digitalevidencetoolkit/). 
  • Report harassment to your instructor and Department Head. 

• Resources for support
  • For Royal Roads students, you can connect to support through Student Services and Indigenous Student Services.
  • In event of online harassment, support can be sourced from HeartMob, an organization which offers resources and volunteer support for documenting harassment. 
  • Crash Override Network is a crisis resource for people experiencing online abuse (embed: http://www.crashoverridenetwork.com)

Recent research shows that victims of online harassment often internalize blame for their experiences, and even have trouble convincing people that such harassment is harmful. In the event of harassment, it is good to remind yourself that IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT.  Royal Roads University and the MACAL program take online harassment seriously and will work to support you in event of such experiences.

Our relationships to online technologies and the tools that we use to enact them can be both exciting and liberating as we connect to new communities, establish our voices, and develop new skills, but they can also come with a darker side if such tools begin to dominate how we engage with ourselves and the world. Being online and having an online presence is about balance, which can be tricky given the way social media are designed to keep us continually attuned to them in an unbalanced way.

The capitalist model of social media is built on attention — your attention. Typically, the more attention you give to something online, such as Facebook, the more capital you produce for whatever platform you are engaging with because your attention (i.e., how long you stay on a page, how often you return to it, what you click on, etc.) is something that can be commodified and sold to advertisers and market research firms. This means that it’s in the best interest of profit-driven platforms like Facebook to get you to use its tools as often as possible, for as long as possible. A shorthand for this system of exchange is the attention economy (Vaidhyanathan 2018).  

Ever plan to take just a quick moment to scan your feed and realize you’ve lost an hour to your device not doing much of anything? Such a common experience isn’t the fault of you being bored or weak but is a product of technologies designed to keep us scrolling even when we know we could be doing other things (like finishing a project, going for a walk, playing with our kids, etc.). Facebook, as one example, drew on studies on the effects of gambling on the brain to help optimize people’s engagement with the platform in a way that keeps people clicking even well beyond its usefulness to their needs. In other words, it’s designed to be addictive. 

While aside from being a time suck, the effects of such online engagement don’t come without costs to you. Increasingly research is demonstrating how our brains are being impacted by the effects of technology, which is resulting in everything from anxiety and depression. But one of the less obvious negative effects of social media use is the impact it has on our capacity for deep forms of concentration. Because the information online often comes in short, rapid bursts (think about scrolling Instagram, a homepage for Youtube, even Netflix!) we can lose our capacity for sustained focus as our brains begin to be trained and to expect a constant input of information. 

But all is not lost! You don’t have to quit social media if you find use in it, and you don’t have to swear off the internet. But it is helpful for you to get clear on why you use the Internet and social media, and how and when it serves you and your goals, interests, and values best. This means cultivating what Cal Newport (2019) calls a “personal technology philosophy,” which is basically a way for you to decide the boundaries and intention behind your technology use.

Questions to ask yourself: 

1. What are the things I value about my life?
2. How do the technologies I use support those things I value?
3. How do the technologies I use make those things more difficult? 
4. Now look at the answers to questions 3 and 4 and see where there is friction. Take steps to reduce that friction. This often comes in the form of strong boundaries around what you use and how you use it.  

And don’t worry, this isn’t something you will necessarily perfect immediately, and will necessarily evolve over time as your needs and desires change. It will also look different for everyone.

Freedom: Can be used on all devices, is not free. Create multiple lists, schedule blocks, block everything except exempt sites you choose.

Self-control: a free and easy to use app, only available for Mac users. Create a block list and timer to block distracting sites as needed.

The pomodoro technique: A timer method which helps break work into focused and manageable chunks

Trello: Free version. For project management, collaborative way to organize tasks and communicate with peers or colleagues.

Eliminate social media apps from phone; research shows that our phones are exceptionally distracting — even having your phone in your workspace with you can impact your ability to concentrate!

Deactivate or eliminate accounts that don’t align with your personal technology philosophy.  

Take more breaks!

Slow down.