Blog Post #2 – What Does My Digital Identity Look Like?

In this day and age, digital identity refers to all of our online representations, relationships and data. Some social media platforms cluster large numbers of digitally identifiable users, dividing them into domains, users and creators. As a result, users and creators can have greater control over social platforms, where they communicate with people and better reflect how they see themselves and want to be seen. An early concrete manifestation of digital identity was the world of Avatars, our extension to the virtual realm.

In digital identity, people see its usefulness in the age of social media. Its appeal is immense and often depends on a desire for self-expression and interaction, which in today’s apathetic society is something everyone, including me, longs for. There is not only one social media; it has many platforms on the Internet: web pages, games, apps, etc. The invention of Google and Facebook logins. For exampleostensibly to make it easier for consumers to log in and help increase conversion rates on individual sites – has dramatically improved the user experience on many sites and provided advertisers with a valuable set of data. But it has also contributed to the convergence of different digital identities.

More people prefer to build their avatars – characters or images that digitally represent the user – than “real” identities. The reasons for this are varied, but it is most likely a desire to separate identities from real life and create different personas online to express the feelings they want to vent.

For me, there are several reasons to establish multiple identities on social media:

• I would create multiple TikTok, Instagram or Twitter accounts. My classmates won’t get the accounts I use more often because I don’t want them to know the real me. I don’t want to tie my social background to the Internet or say that one of my accounts is only tied to specific content.
• When I am playing online games, I will build a charming character as a way to show a version of myself. I will find like-minded friends in games. Compared with real friends, the friends on the network let me more without words.
• My profile tells about my career and learning experience on some academic websites, and some articles and videos show my professional knowledge.

With multiple digital identities, I think there are also huge risks. This means that my personal information is exposed more on the Internet. For example, I may experience card theft, fraudulent phone calls, etc. So the digital identity of the future needs better technology to support privacy and security so that I can feel more comfortable presenting myself online.