Digital citizenship, Digital Presence, or Digital Ethics, covers a wide range of topics. As we are surrounded by a digital community today, it is important to be aware of the quality of Digital Citizenship. In the market of commerce, Digital Citizenship helps association and communication. When doing works and research, Digital Citizenship acts as a role of a detector. As a student, we are taught about the importance of Digital Citizenship. It is everywhere inseparably in our daily lives, but what exactly is Digital Citizenship? In my own definition of Digital Citizenship, it is how one thinks, behaves, and acts online. It is also like your online portfolio that presents one’s identity.
The video below is a quick introduction to digital citizenship.
The image below shows the common notices of remaining a good digital citizenship.
The link below also identifies the Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship: http://www.digitalcitizenship.net/nine-elements.html
Among those nine elements of Digital Citizenship, the eighth element: Digital Health & Wellness grabs my attention because the overuse of the internet has caused many serious problems to us physically and psychologically nowadays. The new digital generation is experiencing the excessive use of smartphones and computers. It has already become a habitual behavior which is the ‘Internet addiction’. Long periods of overusing technologies can cause numerous health problems physically such as harming our eyes and repetitive stress syndrome, and psychologically such as online bullying and causing obsessive behaviors, especially on social media. One of my personal experiences is that several times when I am in a restaurant, people are being silent all the time while they are waiting for food or lining in a queue. Suddenly I feel the world is deathly still and I realize myself is also holding my phone. I never notice that the world is silent because we are concentrating on our phones. Although the internet and the technologies act helpfully and essentially in our daily lives, we should always balance our actual usage of technologies and avoid excessive needs to keep ourselves physically and mentally sound and healthy.
Below are links about how social media affects college admission: https://www.toptieradmissions.com/power-of-social-media-in-college-admissions/
A confess from a college counselor: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christeare/2015/10/18/dont-let-social-media-hurt-your-college-or-career-start/#301457ea49e9
In the midst of various resources, one of the most impressive brand new messages I learned about digital citizenship was that one’s digital presence really has a huge impact on his or her college admission by daily somewhat-mundane activities.
In my opinion, it is not fair for college to check students’ social media accounts because I think it is invading students’ privacy and personal social lives. If today my account is revealed to the college counselor when I am trying to apply for the college, I would not feel happy to reveal my accounts to them who I don’t want to. As a student who’s heading to college, I think the requirements of being selected into a college does not include the quality of how you manage your social media. I think that if the college is looking at my conditions, the portfolio I provided to them and my accounts on social media are two separate things to consider.
On the other side, I also think that if I am the college counselor, I might be checking student’s social media accounts and believing that this is appropriate. Imagine Harvard University gets more than 3000 applications a year and how are they going to select their students if all of them give them their perfect polio? If I saw a student is unable to manage his or her social media appropriately, t tells me that they are not being honest and responsible for themselves. The colleges are seeking for the student who has the features and characteristics that fit their schools. Nevertheless, the scores on the portfolios do not tell the whole story.
However, I think it is difficult and blurry to determine the boundary between college admissions and social media. On one’s perspective, some actions are seemed to be allowed for necessity, but on the other perspective, it seems disrespectful for some people. In summary, I think it is a very interesting news for me to know especially as a high schooler who will be meeting the same concern in the future years. It is very opinionated and biased based on different perspectives and viewpoints, so I think the college should establish and clarify a more transparent rule about the relationship between students’ social media accounts and their college admissions.
From the website: Toptier admissions, one of the section in the article discusses the biggest social media issues that colleges see on student’s accounts and the ways to avoid them. One of the worth noticing reminders is to always check the security and posting settings on each of your accounts, for example: the settings of the people who have the access to your posts, approval of being tagged in others’ posts or pages, and approval of any posts that post onto your page.
A query of mine after reading the article is that whether it is okay to post inappropriate posts if you change your security settings to private so the colleges won’t see. What I want to say is that, shouldn’t you just don’t post inappropriate things online at all?
Although the sources mentioned about how and why the college care about students’ behavior on their social media. I still wonder whether they will really find every student’s accounts and how. If they couldn’t find some students’ accounts or they hid their accounts, what would they do? Will they give up on searching it or will they find information in other ways?
Overall, what I learned in the articles is very surprising for me because I did not know about that information. I never thought that the college takes it as a consideration of their admission. Consequently, what I am doing right now on my social media takes part in an influential impact on my future development. I know that social media is a very powerful platform, but now I would be even more cautious when I am being online.