Online I am a very expressive person. Online I do present myself more privately than I do offline. How I identify myself offline is very different yet similar to how I express myself online and they are very different from each other in so many ways. In my real not online life, I am extremely open, I can talk about anything anywhere at any time I don’t consider myself a private person whatsoever and overshare a lot. I am not a shy individual and I also consider myself to be a very strong-minded person as well. I showcase these traits in my daily life, I share a lot of stories and pieces of my day that occurred or things that will occur. I talk freely about my likes and dislikes and make myself known to those whom I share. My co-workers even know a lot of details my family knows and what posts people would keep private to themselves. I am truly an open book and an honest person who will remain upfront. My honesty is something I cherish in my offline identity and believe it makes up my character. I am extremely passionate and can never stop talking about my passions and obsessions.
Although I would say this is how I act offline this is different than how I act online. After digging through and digitally mapping myself I learned a lot and was humbled by my online identity. I learned that online I am quite expressive, but I am extremely private about it. I don’t share a lot of content with all my followers, it is not to say I don’t like it, but I like to keep my online life more private and personal. I share a lot within my close friends’ groups which is similar to my offline identity. Online though I enjoy expressing myself through simple pictures. I share a lot of pictures of my family and my nephew, different from offline where I share a lot of my friends and family. I don’t post about my relationship all that often and choose to post on special occasions which surprised me since I am extremely open to discussing this topic offline. I learned also that I spend a lot of time creating inspiration for many things such as outfits, food, hairstyles, decoration, and party ideas, and I use Instagram and Pinterest to do this. Throughout this assignment, I discovered that my largest presence online is not Instagram like I thought it was Pinterest. I share, reshare, and save so much content daily, and going through my screen time on my phone backs this up because I spend more than half of my screen time on that app. One thing that both my identities have in common in my advocacy. In my offline identity, I share and advocate a lot for women’s rights specifically related to women’s right to be pro-choice. After digging through my old Instagram stories that are archived, I found many posts I shared about this topic which is different from how I choose to express many more topics and world problems I like to advocate for. I found it interesting that I feel strongly about a few topics just as much as this one but chose to share this both online and offline in hopes of making a difference. This was a very interesting discovery because I thought I remained more private about this topic online. This same concept discussed is the same theme in my personal texts, going through them I text and talk about many similar things. One last thing I learned was how much time I spend on my digital identity, which is more than I thought that I did, I average 2-4 hours daily digitally on apps and texting, phone calls, shopping, and watching videos.
The only concern I have about the future of my digital identity is things on Facebook I used to post and share when I was younger, although the content is all appropriate it is childlike and immature, and I think that in the future that content needs to be cleared to maintain a professional space digitally. My identity digitally is semi-multi modal I share pictures and videos, and reshare a lot. I don’t share a lot of textual posts and would say I lack the linguistic modality I think sharing more text and tone would help diversify my online presence. Overall, I present myself online similar to how I express myself offline I am open about my passions, but I am careful with whom I choose to share it with which is the main difference between my offline and online identity.
