Being open on social media: professional roles and online identities

In my first blog post I wrote about the use of social media in supporting the student experience. I then read with interest the blog posts by Sara Smith and Debbie Smith who wrote about their experience of and thoughts on using social media to support their academic practice and the challenges and opportunities that this presented. Being open on social media creates an opportunity to communicate across boundaries, and to create networks free from traditional hierarchies. But with these opportunities come the challenges of establishing a new way of communicating and opening oneself to negative views. In Sara and Debbie’s posts I recognised my own mixed feelings about starting to use social media in a professional context. I also felt that our three blog posts shared a general sense that being ‘open’ on social media was something that we all felt compelled to at least try. And this got me thinking about how this new impetus to be open on social media has changed our professional roles.

Bonnie Stewart has observed that when we engage with social media in a professional context, we transition from having a ‘role’ which is defined for us, whether it be lecturer, researcher or support staff, into having an online identity which we have to define and differentiate for ourselves. This idea really interested me as the transition from role to identity raises many issues, the most obvious being the blurring of lines between our professional and personal selves. When heading off on annual leave the majority of us will put an out-of-office message on our work email address, but how many of us will continue to check our social media accounts? It is much less easy to switch off from your online persona.

There is also the question of how or indeed whether you integrate the various aspects of your life online. When I first became involved in student Facebook groups a dilemma I faced at the time was whether or not to use my personal Facebook account when interacting with students. It just didn’t seem appropriate to me to merge accounts that represented my personal views and interests with a role in which I was acting on behalf of the University, guiding and advising students. Aware that my views on this might just be hopelessly out-dated, I looked to others for guidance, but when I spoke to colleagues there wasn’t one consistent approach. Some used personal accounts and accepted students as ‘friends’, others used their own accounts but rejected friend requests from students. Another group set up ‘work’ Facebook profiles that were completely independent of their personal accounts.

Facebook have in the past have actively sought to close down this type of duplicate account and Mark Zuckerberg has been vocal in his criticism of people who create multiple identities for themselves on social media. In the book The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick, Zuckerberg is quoted as saying:
“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

The backlash against this comment came from a range of different communities — including the LGBT community, survivors of abuse, and those who work in professions where having a searchable online identity puts them at risk. In his blog post on the subject, Michael Zimmer, describes less extreme examples of why Mark Zuckerberg’s notion of a ‘complete’ online self is flawed, explaining that there are plenty of everyday contexts in which it is appropriate to modify certain aspects of our personalities and behaviours. How we behave in a job interview for example is going to be very different to how we behave in a bar with our friends in a bar on a Saturday night. This doesn’t mean that one of those identities is more authentic than the other. This has long been recognised as a key element of human interaction; in her review on Social Media and Identity, Nicole Ellison, references Erving Goffman’s work on self-presentation in the 1950s which made similar observations about how we construct our social and professional identities. Ellison concludes:
‘It should be noted that engaging in impression management is not manipulative or deceptive, but rather a natural aspect of human relationships that in many ways can make interactions flow more smoothly and enable individuals to meet their personal and professional goals.’

So why is Mark Zuckerberg so insistent that we should not employ these well-established identity strategies online? Obviously, there have been highly publicised cases where aliases have been set up with malicious intent, but as others have pointed out, having a real identity policy suited Facebook, particularly in its early years. Insisting on real online identities that were easily searchable fuelled connections and helped the network to grow. Knowing the real identity of the user also enabled Facebook to accumulate data that could be cross-referenced against other platforms and used for marketing purposes. Interestingly Zuckerberg seems to have relaxed his stance on this in recent years and there is speculation that this is in response to the rise in popularity of platforms such as Snapchat that afford users a greater level of privacy. An interesting article here describes how a new generation of social media users are exploiting the differing levels of privacy and visibility offered by various platforms to create a sophisticated system of fragmented identities.

Whilst duplicate accounts may be one way of managing specific situations where there is a need to keep clearly defined aspects of your online identity separate, depending on what you are hoping to achieve this may not be an effective strategy. Also, from a logistical point of view the time spent maintaining multiple accounts may compromise how active and how successful those accounts are. In many cases professional social media users will have to forge a new identity that mediates between the different aspects of our personal and professional lives. In many ways social media enables us to construct an ideal identity, allowing us to carefully create and curate our profiles and content. Unlike in everyday situations, online we have the time to consider and craft our responses. However, undercutting this advantage are the difficulties of navigating an undefined and potentially volatile audience. As Ellison explains, the term context collapse describes the shifting and uncertain nature of online audiences. Whereas in real life, as we’ve already discussed, you know the social context you are operating in and can adjust your identity accordingly, in an online network you are likely to face various contexts collapsed in to one another. Debbie articulated this issue in her blog post — when you are unsure of the audience you are communicating with, how do you know how best to present yourself and your work?

The notion of collapsed publics, as defined by Bonnie Stewart here describes the potential end product of context collapse, in which individuals who have ‘the digital capacity to capture and circulate — even to the point of virality — the often casual contributions of others outside their intended contexts and audiences.’ We’ve all read about examples of this, where a misjudged tweet intended for the author’s own specific network of followers is picked up by unintended audiences who distort its context and meaning with dramatic consequences. Jon Ronson cites the example of Justine Sacco and other victims of online shaming here.

In these disturbing accounts it becomes evident how damage created by a mismanaged online identity can also devastate an offline identity. What I find interesting here is how the remarks, jokes, photos these shaming victims shared were not just taken out of context in the sense of their meaning, but were given a sense of significance that would not have been afforded to them if they had been made conversationally. When your online identity is composed solely of what you post and share, then every remark, joke, photo becomes an artefact of that identity, whether or not that was intended. Participation in social media becomes a performance of self in which your identity is constructed by your audience, and the way in which they interpret that identity can also shift. Justine Sacco’s tweet was not intended to be taken in a professional context — it was a joke made on a personal account to a small group of followers — but when it got picked up by other groups it became associated with her professional role. It then became a story about a PR executive making an inappropriate comment. This is obviously an extreme example, but it demonstrates how as well as having to negotiate the context collapse of an uncertain audience, and the prospect of collapsed publics in which the initial meaning of a message can be de and re-constructed by other groups, there is also a sense of collapsed of identity in which your various professional and personal identities will become unavoidably merged.

A recent article in the Guardian got me thinking more about these issues specifically in relation to the HE sector. In this article, part of the Guardian’s Anonymous Academic series, the author describes the pressure they feel as an early career researcher to actively promote their research on social media. The author questions whether all of those participating in social media in this way are really contributing to openness by sharing information with their peers; many, the author speculates, are now paying lip service to this ideal in order to promote themselves. These arguments have been discussed by various other social media commentators. It seems to be widely accepted, for example, that HE institutions are coming to realise the power and influence of having an active social media profile in the same way that other industries have done for some time. This increased awareness of the opportunities and the risks posed by social media for the HE community has contributed to a situation where the higher stakes inhibit people from fully engaging in discussion. As Bonnie Stewart observes in her blog post ‘something is rotten in the state of…Twitter’, there has been an erosion of the participatory culture in Twitter which facilitates openness within the HE community.
What really caught my attention about this particular article in the Guardian was the reaction it provoked online. It attracted a very high number of comments on the Guardian’s website and on its Twitter feed where the article was, perhaps ironically, promoted. While some of these comments acknowledged the author’s concerns but politely disagreed, many more were critical and critical not just of the opinions expressed, but were scornful of the author and their perceived character. The following Storify post explains how the ‘HE Twitterati’ picked up the story and their reaction quickly gathered momentum across Twitter. Someone commenting on the Guardian’s website raised concerns about the nature of this response:

As this comment suggests the real flash point appears to be the headline which prompted the hashtag ‘#seriousacademic’ and sparked a series of gleefully mocking memes. This epithet, which, again the comment above suggests, may not have even originated with the author, shifted the focus away from the author’s opinions and onto how they identified themselves. In other words the ‘twitter storm’ was not primarily caused by the argument itself, which as I’ve said isn’t entirely new, but by the way that the article created a perceived identity for others to react to and distance themselves from — and in doing so reaffirm the online academic identity that they have created for themselves.

Much of this blog post has been concerned with the difficulties and challenges of being open on social media and of how to create a digital identity that facilitates this. You may be forgiven for thinking that I’m making a case for opting out of what seems to be an increasing expectation in our professional lives. But I’m not; I believe that in spite of the horror stories there are many ways in which social media can enhance what we do. The point I’m trying to make is that it isn’t as easy as just going online and being your ‘self’, because the nuanced, multi-faceted aspects of our real world identities do not translate into an online context where our audiences and their many interpretative contexts elide. Many people do, however, successfully negotiate these challenges and researchers working in the field of social media and academia, such as Bonnie Stewart, identify the attenuation and visibility strategies that these people successfully employ to engage others whilst mitigating potential negativity. Another strategy we can all employ is to think carefully about how we react to others online. ‘Call out’ culture has been an important element of Twitter and there are times when it is appropriate and justified; but it has to be used judiciously. The anonymous author of the Guardian article is unlikely to have changed their stance on social media in the workplace after the way in which their views were received, which seems to me a shame, because views that challenge and promote open discussion are exactly what a meaningful and participatory HE community needs.