Community Contribution #1 — Digital Identity
When I think about my own digital identity, I don’t think of one profile. I think of at least two. There’s my LinkedIn, where I’m a fourth-year Computer Science student applying to software co-ops, careful about how I frame my project experience. And there’s @nav.tries on Instagram, where I post golf swing clips and DJ practice reels edited in DaVinci Resolve. Both are “me,” but they’re built for completely different audiences, and that split gets at exactly what this week’s readings are wrestling with: what actually is a digital identity?
Jawed define “digital professional identity” as the professional identity that develops through internet-based social interactions using online platforms and communication tools. What I find useful about their framing is that they treat it as dynamic. Not something you set once in a bio and forget, but something that keeps forming based on how you present yourself and how others respond.
boyd (2012) pushes this further and explores it in a way that changed how I think about my own online presence. Her argument is that no one fully controls their digital identity, because our data is networked connected to friends, family, and algorithmic inference, not just our own choices. She points out that platforms build a “probabilistic” picture of who you are based on patterns across millions of other users, not just what you personally post. That resonates with my experience running @nav.tries: I don’t fully control how that account gets interpreted. The Instagram algorithm decides who sees it, comment sections shape how a “golf and DJing” account reads to strangers.
This is where the personal-versus-professional tension gets real for students specifically. My LinkedIn is curated for recruiters deliberately narrow, deliberately safe. My Instagram is looser and more personal, but it’s still public, still searchable, and still something a future employer could stumble across. Jawed et al. argue institutions should give students more explicit guidance here, and I agree. Most of us are building these parallel identities by trial and error.
As for professional networks specifically, the students lean most heavily on LinkedIn, Twitter, and blogs to build what’s called a “personal learning network” a group of people you deliberately connect with to learn from, not just socialize with. In CS specifically, that extends to GitHub and developer-focused Discord communities, spaces that function less like a resume and more like an ongoing conversation with people further along the same path.