Virtual Environments: Is one life enough?

CLASS SUMMARY:

We read about Paris Brown the 17-year-old girl who was forced to resign from her post as Britain’s first youth police commissioner with the emergence of embarrassing tweets she posted a few years previously. The article underpinned a discussion about the importance of managing your online profile rather than allowing it to develop in an ad hoc manner that could be problematic later. Issues that were surfaced included the use of multiple profiles or identities, the value of joining social media spaces versus the ‘cost’, terms of use, and the future of online engagement. Poker players suggest that if you cannot tell the sucker during a game then it is yourself – we have often suggest in this module that if you are not paying for a service then you are the product. The lesson is to be aware of how social media and online engagement works and try to make informed decisions about membership of any group.