Authentic or Anonymous Online Identities

I still remember when I got to go on the Internet for the first time. I was in first grade, and my family had gotten a computer with dialup. The computer was put in my parents’ bedroom, and I could use it if they were present. I did what any 6 year old in 1997 would do if they go access to the Internet; I went online to look for pictures of Pokemon.

Those first few times online felt so powerful to me as a little kid. It felt like a whole world could open up for me, and it was a world that I was in control of in some way. I could look up anything that interested me, which at the time just happened to be facts about pikachu.

As time went on, the Internet started to change, and my relationship with it changed as well. Going online wasn’t just about looking up articles and being a consumer of content anymore. You could also interact with people all around the world on any variety of topics, no matter how niche. I started to read message boards, and I was amazed how random people all over the world would come together to talk about all kinds of topics. I always felt a bit of a pull to try and post on these boards myself, but there was always something holding me back.

Since the internet was so new when I was growing up, there was a strong sense of fear around it. As students, we didn’t get a lot of education about what happened online, except that we were not supposed to trust things that we read on the Internet. At the time, basically everything online was done anonymously. Posters used screen names, and had the shield anonymity to be different from the people they were offline. Then a shift started to change as we went from the message board internet to the social media age of today.

It was interesting to go back and read an article from The Guardian in 2012 about this disconnect between the groups who wanted to blend the online and offline personas and those who wanted a hard separation. At the time, Google and Facebook wanted to make a more authentic online experience that made sure people’s real identities were linked with their accounts. This was supposed to give people some peace of mind that the people they were talking to online were who they said they were and users would have more trust in the platforms.

However, there was another side to this argument who wanted to re-anonymise the internet and take it back to something more akin to the message board days of old. The champions quoted in the article were Chris Poole, the creator of 4chan, the image board website that would become home to the QAnon Conspiracy Theory and the hacking group Anonymous, and Andrew Lewman, the executive director of the Tor Project. The arguments these men make centred on how people should have the freedom to experiment with different aspects of their identities online, and people should have spaces to express their multi-faceted identities without fear of ridicule.

The other aspect of Poole and Lewman’s argument we are still grappling with today is the power tech companies have to track where we go online and construct the world we see. Because of the tracking that happens online, it can be difficult to really leave things in the past if it constantly gets dragged up each time you go online. The concept of data mining and who controls the data we put out online only became more important post 2012, especially after 2016 and all we learned about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Looking at digital identities in 2023, I see most people as having a combination of the anonymous and the authentic. People have accounts linked to their real names and images, but these are usually quite curated snapshots of the self that don’t always give the whole picture. Also, in recent years people have begun to have a better understanding of how things like data mining work, but I don’t know how much they really care. As an example, I think it is a good thing that websites give you that little popup now about accepting cookies, but I still find it annoying that it comes up each time I go on a website. So, I guess even though I know I am being watched online I don’t know what to do to stop it.

Anyway, I am getting a little rambly here. To finish off, I would like to know how you see the balance between the anonymous and the authentic online? Are the images that people put of themselves online a real picture of themselves, or are people being just as unreliable as when their real names were not associated with their accounts?

The Sask. Digital Citizenship Continuum: Balancing The Good and the Bad of the Digital World

To help prepare for my final assignment in EC&I 832, I’ve spent the last few days going through the Sask, Digital Citizenship Continuum and trying to see how the Contiuum best fits in with ELA B10, one of the classes I currently teach.

The Continuum gives teachers an idea of what their students will need to know to become good, active citizens in the modern age. It ranges from kindergarten through Grade 12 and tries to make sure that through each grade students build on their skills, and that they will hopefully continue to build on this skills once their time in school is done. It is broken into three broad areas, respect, education, and protection, and each broad area has specific focuses. Respect has students look at digital etiquette, access, and law. Education wants students to look at digital communication, literacy, and commerce, while digital protection wants students to engage with digital rights, security, an d health. Then, for each of these more specific areas there are understandings and skills for students to gain. Since I have primarily taught high school, I looked at the skills for Grades 10-12 and tried to think about how they could best fit into my courses.

ELA B10 is focused on two themes: Equity and Ethics and the World Around. These are two broad areas, and there are a lot of interesting questions students can grabble with, such as “what is the right thing to do”, and “how do we create meaning from the world around us.” It is an interesting course that I am happy to teach.

Looking through the Digital Citizenship Continuum, there are a lot of topics that can overlap between the course and the skills students need in the continuum. The first one that stuck to me was digital access. This area wants students to understand that their “access to technology determines … (their)… participation and opportunities”, and asks students to become advocates for digital rights. I found this to be a powerful idea, and thought it fit very well with my ELA B10 course, as it asks students to consider how an inequality of access to certain learnings or technologies directly leads to a lack of opportunities. As well, I liked how the Continuum asked students to become participants in the creation of classroom technology policies so they can have a more active voice in how they want to see personal technology use in their classrooms.

But, there are some problems with the Continuum’s goals as well. To me, it appears like the continuum is trying to present an honest view of the internet, but I worry that if not done right students could come to view the internet as a place filled with nothing but criminals. Some of the continuum’s required understandings include for students to understand how their reputation is affected by online communication, and I could easily see that becoming an exercise in scaring kids about how they need to be extremely careful about what they post or they could ruin their lives.

I don’t want it to seem like I don’t want kids to be careful when they post things online. I do. I think it is important that students are thoughtful and careful about what they post, but I also don’t want them to live in constant fear about their potential downfall because of something they said on Snapchat.

So, I guess my biggest question is how to balance these types of conversations. What is the way forward, to give kids an honest view of the internet that is not too scary or too optimistic in its view?

The Internet is Real Life

For years now I’ve been hearing people say the phrase “the Internet is not real life.” After seeing the cavalcade of negative interactions that can happen online, there is a desire among many to separate the online from world from the “real world.” All of the problems and discussions that are happening in the darkness of social media cannot really be a problem for real, living, breathing humans? Can it?

There is only one problem with this kind of thinking: for a lot of people today the world they experience online is far more real than anything they experience offline. In a world where more and more peoples’ jobs, friendships, hobbies, and love lives exist fully online, there can barely even be a distinction between activities that are “offline” and those that are “online.” And even though some of us still may want to say that the online world is not “real life”, the effects, actions, and attitudes of people online can have real world effects. This makes Mike Ribbles “9 Elements of Digital Citizenship” all the more important.

I am not going to talk about all nine of the elements in this blog post, but all of them are important to understanding the digital world and what our roles are in it. Today, I am just going to highlight three of the elements that have the most important in my experience as an educator, and what I think will be the most important going forward.

Digital Access– Having an equitable distribution of digital tools and access to them.

This is the area that I have seen as the biggest area of need in Saskatchewan schools. There is currently so much demand for technology in classrooms, but the supply simply cannot keep up with it. In terms of technology, schools want to be able to provide caviar, but they only have a canned tuna budget. As technology continues to advance, this will probably only continue to get worse before it gets better. Schools can struggle to provide students with the latest and greatest technology when there simply isn’t the budget for it. This is only made more stark when you consider how many students lack access to digital schools outside of school. We will need to be able to better provide students access to technology so we can both prepare them for the world they are going into, but also to meet with them in the world they already live in.

Digital Rights and Responsibilities– Rights and freedoms extended to everyone in a digital world.

We may not think about it all the time, but the digital world brings with it new types of rights and responsibilities for all people. These include things such as the right to have access to the Internet, and protecting others in the digital space. As more and more of our public discourse migrates online, it is going to be more and more important for students to know the rights that they have, but also to advocate for the rights of others. It is in this area where the idea of “citizenship” in “digital citizenship” comes up in my mind. As the idea of digital rights becomes more of conversation, students will need to have a better understanding of what those rights are and what they can do to be an advocate for those who lack those rights currently.

Digital Literacy– making meaning in digital spaces.

Before this week, I thought I knew what digital literacy was, but as I have dug deeper into the topic, I see how little I really knew. Loewus’ aritcle “What is Digital Literacy?” does a good job of going over the topic in a digestible way, and there was one key idea that struck me in the article. Digital Literacy is a totally new form of literacy and should be treated as such.

I know this may sound obvious, but I had not considered it before. I thought that if I had students reading an article from website that it wasn’t all that different from reading an article on the page, so what is the big deal here? What I hadn’t considered was that the way we consume and interact with digital content is different than analog content. The article makes reference to how when reading a New York Times article online, the page may be filled with hyperlink, video, and other graphics. Whenever one of these new options comes up, readers have to ask whether they want to engage with the additional content or not, and creates a text that designed so “no two readers experience it in the exact same way” according to Troy Hicks from Central Michigan University.

In the digital space, readers have so much more power than before to make new meaning out of texts. They can share texts, comment on them , and remix them into something totally new. But, people have to be adept at multiple types of literacy that are specific to certain spaces. The way one engages with a TikTok video is different from a YouTube video, and the meaning behind a post on Reddit is different from a tweet.

One thing about the digital world is it is bigger than any one country on Earth, and it is filled with little pockets that have their own little languages. If we want students to be “digitally literate” they need to recognise these differences and communicate with all of these groups effectively.