Picture taken by Jonathan Acuña at Musée d’Ordsay, Paris, France (2019)

The Handling of Online Selves

Beware of the effects when they collide!

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.

Head of Curriculum Development Senior Language Professor

Academic Department School of English
Centro Cultural Costarricense- Faculty of Social Sciences
Norteamericano Universidad Latina de Costa Rica

Sunday, July 26, 2020

Post 351

Opinion Prompt Regarding Online Identity

What questions does this pose for you, your family, friends, or colleagues on
their online identities?

Think for a moment on your family members, your group of friends, the
troop of colleagues of yours, and even yourself. How is it that all these people,
including you, project who they are when they are online? How do they represent
themselves online? How is each one of them perceived by others in this virtual
environment. If communication is disembodied in social media, how does each
user in the groups above handle their online self?
 Your dear ones’ selves must find their space in social media as well as yours.
We should assume that everyone is the warder of their online persona. The fact is
that people in your professional or personal networks may not be aware of the
seeds of dire repercussions when these two networks come together as one.
People’s postings on social media may be deemed to be unsuitable, improper,
impolite, and sacrilegious depending on who is reading or viewing them. This rises
ethical issues on both sides of the spectrum that user’s online selves do not know
how to cope with.

At one education institution I work for, a particular situation happened

unwilfully several years ago. A teacher of ours, who had a YouTube channel where
age inappropriate content of his authorship was uploaded regularly, was in charge
of teen groups. In the eyes of the school administration this posed an ethical
problem because it was then thought, “what happens if parents or their children
get to watch the content of his puppet theater? And what if they discover that all
this is the production of their kids’ instructor?” Was this teacher’s wrongdoing in
the eyes of administration blameworthy? The fact is that his personal, professional,
and hobby persona had collided, and, according to his detractors, his theatrical
work online could damage the institution’s reputation.

My own children, my colleagues, friends, and basically anyone build their

online identity as if they were in the real world. The lesson learned from the
collision of online selves and the puppet theater of one of our teachers brings
several morals everyone has to apply while their online personas are present in
their social media sites: 1) The language we choose to use in our virtual lives can
be amply criticized depending on who we are in the eyes of others; 2) the imagery
attached to our personal postings is not separated from what we do professionally;
3) whatever is present in our social media profiles is used by visitors to construct
the image they have of ours; and 4) if no niche knowledge is contributed, we are
spiteful influencers that just intend to corrupt other people’s mind.

Based on what has been stated here, your family members, your group of
friends, the troop of colleagues of yours, and even yourself “embody” different
types of personas. At times, your family/friends-driven persona is present while
interacting with them, e.g., on WhatsApp. Then your professional self manifests
when you give your specialist opinion regarding the latest finance report in the
office through the office Google Hangouts chat. And some other times your hobby
persona shares with the world your artistic self in painting, design, photography,
memes, and the like on a WordPress blog. The problem is not the co-existence of
all these selves; trouble arises when one cannot be differentiated from the
other(s).