Your Digital footprints... How can it affect you?

In this era of booming social media, many peoples would care less on what they post, share, or comment on the social media platforms. Dr. Sadrag Shihomeka, a Lecturer at the University of Namibia in his public presentation (held 26th Oct 17) on "social media vigilantism" has stressed the issues of ethical use of the social media and the repercussion of one's trails on the social media. I would like to zoom a little bit on what or how one's trails or footprints can haunt him/her, block his/her potentials and ruin his/her professional reputation.

There is a growing trend of requiring job seekers to apply through web platforms  among the organizations. These organizations would ask the job seekers to provide their social media (facebook, twitter, linkedin) url/links in addition to their CVs. The reasons why organizations would like to scrutinize your social media life is because there is a link between how you behave of social media/online and how you behave offline. Even though some youth would often put disclaimers on their social media walls to say what they say on social media does not necessarily reflect their offline or 'real life', it would not be easy to convince someone that one's offline life would not overlap with online life  even though not necessarily 100%.

It is easy to think that deleting 'unholy' content from your social media space would solve the problem, but we should be aware that once a content on the web  it will be available forever and it will be forever linked to you even if you eventually delete your social media account. 

Apart from influencing your chances of being appointed for a job, your digital footprint would also influence how other people look at you. If you are a youngster for instance, and would not care much about posting insane content, try to imagine your own children ending up seeing your connection to such content. If you would like to later venture into some sort of business, your digital footprint also has a potential of influencing your customers.

On the other note, we can also learn each other's personalities by looking at other's social media trails. We should all up our web skills to be able to search on each other's social media footprint to be able to understand their behaviours, even though the 'online-offline life-overlap' would not always be 100%, it will surely give useful hints. This can be more useful especially when you have to make a deal with someone, business commitments, buying items, visiting places or individuals etc. In the same vain, one should also be aware of the possible 'social media personality masking', where individuals would behave holy on social media while being the opposite on offline life.

The bottom line is that you should be aware of your own digital footprint or social media trails and use digital footprint of others to help you make right judgments/decisions/steps. 


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