Weekly Report & Reflection Post #1: The Importance of Your Digital Footprint

In today’s day and age, technology has taken a more predominant role in society, most notably the internet. As the internet is becoming more widely used, knowledge of your digital footprint and what information you want to put out in the internet is important. For this week in ADED 1P32, we were asked to pick one question or two in regards to digital foot printing, citizenship, and learning. The one question that I would like to address in this post is if I want a digital footprint. I believe that having a digital footprint is important, but more important than that is having control of it. The internet has made information more readily available and information you didn’t believe was out in the internet are becoming more easily accessible. From personal experience, I have seen the power of information leaked onto the internet. One time during work, one of my coworkers asked me how my lunch at Costco was. I thought that was awfully weird question to ask as I didn’t tell him about my lunch plans. I asked him how he knew and he told me that one of my coworkers that I went to lunch with shared a photo of us eating there. This is just one of many examples of the power of social media and digital foot printing. Knowledge of your digital footprint is important, not just in regards to your lunch plans, but also to employers. Employers are now searching information online during the hiring process before they pick out candidates. Having control of your digital footprint is key in order to get the job you desire. Additionally, I believe having control of your digital footprint, helps maintain a reputation you want society to see you as. If you want to seem more professional, creating a LinkedIn account or changing your social media to a professional picture is one of many ways you can control your digital footprint. Having a digital footprint can be beneficial if you control what information you put out to society.

Report

After completing the Digital Driver’s License exam, I will put greater focus on my digital security from the next few weeks of this course. I believe digital security is very important and is something I really want to improve on since I feel that a lot of my personal information is available on the web that I may not want to share. I believe increasing my digital security will allow me to put control of what information is available and present my information in a manner that I find suitable.

One connection that I made with the readings/resources and the Building Background section of the week one module is the following video “Youth and Media: Digital Dossier”. Digital Dossier refers to the idea of how information can accumulate from all of the way from birth and be available via the web. After watching this video it made me cringe because of how true it is. Information that we might believe to be lost or forgotten may be uncovered. Even though this may be scary to some extent, as mentioned above I believe that both digital security and control is important. Having both great security and control will help create a digital dossier that you want, but also present the information you want available to the web.

         
I found this week’s information informative and look forward to what next week has in store.

Amardeep Bola 

Photo 1: https://kurtishewson.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/digital-footprint.png
Photo 2: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6TUMHplBveo/maxresdefault.jpg