What is Digital Identity？

In the video, Eric Stoller said that digital identity is a sort of your footprint on the web. With this, you can get benefits with others in different areas like education and so on.

According to my understanding, digital identity refers to an overview of the information we have online. Everything we do on the web is a part of our digital identities. The comments we make on the Internet, the videos we post, etc. will be converted by the computer into binary-based electronic signals that will eventually be aggregated into our personal digital identity. This will reflect our unique personalities, emotions, and other characteristics.

Nowadays, in ordinary life, people create personal accounts on different social medias and look for things that appeal to them. The content pushed in each person’s account can’t be exactly the same, it will only be similar. The reason for this is because each of us is unique and the web does a good job of recording our habits and reflecting them.

How do personal versus professional approaches to digital identity affect social media use?

In real life, everyone has different identities, such as professors, doctors, lawyers, and so on. These identities have their own unique points for people to record and distinguish. These characteristics stand out in contrast to normal people and are the difference between personal and professional digital identities.

In social media, a professional digital identity brings all kinds of convenience. For example, when someone has a doctor’s logo on the web, it is commonly found in his channel or in the records he views on a daily basis in relation to medicine. And when others want to know something about medicine, they can search online and find a lot of answers to their questions. The providers of these answers are the accounts that have the characteristic of “doctor” on the Internet.

Therefore, for individual digital accounts, the advent of professional digital accounts means that they are not looking for relevant answers without direction and have to question the correctness of that answer when they find it. The convenience enjoyed by personal digital accounts will grow. On the other hand, professional digital accounts will also have the benefit of increasing their reputation, fame and getting revenue. The revenue generated on the web also feeds back to the relevant aspects in reality.

How do digital identities converge in networked publics – what are the impacts and/or benefits?

The convergence of digital identities in a networked public means that everyone’s information on the web is integrated and connected in one piece. All the information in the world exists on the web.

Today, the impact that I have observed is that people are largely inseparable from the Web in their daily lives. Whether it’s for entertainment, learning, or communicating with others, they rely on the ease, efficiency, and substantial benefits of the Internet.

People in all fields must be connected to this information age if they want to further their influence on the public or consider other benefits. For example, after creating an account on a relevant platform and applying for professional certification, one can continuously post videos or posts on the web to increase one’s influence, which in turn feeds into one’s actual income of benefits. Therefore, the most intuitive impact of the integration of digital identities in the networked public is nothing but profit and fame.

The second impact as I see it can be summed up in one sentence: the Internet has no memory. Information changes so quickly that the words and other traces of personal accounts left on the Internet are quickly washed away by all kinds of information. With the rapid exchange and integration of information on the Internet, people in all fields should pay attention to the direction of relevant information. However, any failure to keep up with the changes in information can cause major problems. At the same time, when some people want to cover up the fact that something has happened, they can use a huge amount of information to wash away, use one hot news to distract attention, and finally cover up the negative information that happened in the past.