Source: http://uploads.mattersolutions.com.au/2012/11/networking.jpg

One of the points that Adrian covered in yesterday’s un-lecture thingymabob was the idea of joining all of our different social media outlets in order to create one network that forms our online identity. In other words, we were ‘weaving’ together our reputation.

This concept was both familiar and surprising to me. On one hand we are already used to consolidating our output on different social networking sites and sharing material laterally. My sounds on Soundcloud and videos on YouTube will 95% of the time be shared with my friends on Facebook and Tumblr, and more and more often artists are listing their Twitter and Instagram details in place of usual contact details like email or phone number. However, on the other hand the thought of doing the same thing for THIS blog sounded a bit counter-intuitive. Although a lot of my stuff online was already interconnected, I had still made sure that my social life and hobbies remained separate from anything professional or academic. I wasn’t interested in having a professor stumble upon some photo of me partying, or my friends reading my super formal essay.

But I guess that this is the reality which we’ll have to embrace as media professionals. Our online reputation becomes a fundamental part of our career, and if we can’t conduct ourselves on the internet in a way that accepts on both social and professional levels then we’ll run into trouble. Perhaps that means I should be more attentive of what I say on statuses, because as much as I’d like to hold onto the privacy of certain things from potential employers, in this day and age you’ve got to accept that you can pretty much have only ONE online identity, and choosing which one and how it’s going to represent you matters a whole lot more than I thought before.