Identity Management And Social Media

Social media has strongly influenced our lives by altering our social interaction and therefore affected the development and management of the personal identity. The personal identity is the total of all life experiences of an individual. This experience includes socialization with others and accepting social norms and values from social institutions like family, religion, culture, workplace, etc. Now, the Internet has contributed to making this process faster and accessible to almost all inhabitants of the world. The fact that virtual environment has an influence on the evolution of the personal identity has its downsides too.

Social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, can help people get in touch with their family, relatives, friends. Further, social media sites allow people to share their opinions with millions of others and by doing that meet like-minded people from all over the world. In addition to this, social media tools like Linkedin allow people to create their business profile and make business contacts that can help them in their careers. Even more, using social media one can promote their company or brand online, to generate more leads and get more clients this way.

However, there are downsides to social media, too. For instance, there is a potential risk of information theft or fraudulent activities against individuals on social media. This includes stealing of a person’s confidential information such as contact information, bank account numbers, social security number, etc. Social media has granted people the freedom of speech and expressing their opinions on forums or blogs, where that freedom can also result in bad reactions, such as threats because of one’s writings. For instance, if a journalist or a blogger write against terrorism, they may receive threats from concerned quarters.

It is a wise idea to create separate social media profiles for personal and professional use, in order to reduce the possibility of any unwanted activities against oneself. All the personal data should be kept on the personal profiles. Also, in every social media profile, there are privacy settings that should be worked through carefully and make sure that everything is set in the best possible way to ensure one’s privacy. It seems that this is the only way to limit the downsides of social media.