Authenticity and Validation

2 Dec 2024

In my previous reflection, I had stated that I did not embrace, nor did I advocate for anyone to maintain an online presence of any sort. Social media, blogging, and other forms of content sharing can often be rewarding and even fun, but all too often these sharing platforms open the doors to too much scrutiny, judgement, and even damage to personal and professional lives. Any one particularly “zesty” opinion results in split camps, and reactions and comments range from agreements to condemnation, sometimes even threats.

Social Networking Services (SNS), in their essence, are not bad. They can be useful, entertaining, informative, facilitating, etc. But as with everything else we possess in this world that involves millions of users, it turns to chaos. We hoped for order and more unity, but…

As Voltaire put to words, which has been used countless times since then, with great power comes great responsibility, but how can this ideal be embraced when culturally the world is no longer taught or promotes responsibility and instead focuses on instant gratification? ORDER. Order over instant benefits. How does that get implemented in real life? I have no idea. History has shown that too many times someone striving for order creates a disastrous, tragic conflict affecting millions. Something about agency and all. Well, that loops us back to chaos, including in the world of professional development, personal lives, SNS, and how they all intertwine.

A lot of time, innovators and advocates are encouraged to create and maintain an online presence. One of the arguments to support this is that an online presence strengthens authenticity, somehow. Which begs the questions. A few, actually. Does this online authenticity validate research and knowledge more? Does anonymity reduce the value of someone else’s discovery? Once again, it seems to be expected that the innovators, educators, and everyone else who’s made up their mind to improve something about this planet we live in must sacrifice everything to the masses. SNS’s role in the professional development of an individual seems to be gaining a more and more poisonous effect—increasingly heavier surveillance, speech limitations, fear-mongering, and invasion into the off-work time in every interaction, be it online or in the real world.

“Where there is freedom to share and collaborate, there is often also freedom to abuse and exploit, so we should be careful not to indulge in idealized notions of participation, sharing, and openness that may be misguided.”¹

There’s this too, of course. Openness shouldn’t equal invasion. And not every process needs to be discussed step-by-step, line-by-line with the world. There is value in reflection, selection, and even prior understanding before sharing insights or ideas or anything else.

But aside from that, too often online sharing and personas are much too open for misinterpretation without means of defending oneself, and I personally advocate for a severe split between technologies used for education and SNS. We constantly advocate for connecting with the learners on personal, relatable levels, but online modes of interaction are often lacking in that regard anyway. Plus, as Kimmons and Veletsianos note, it’s important to “ consider power dynamics and how educator identities might be influenced by SNS regulation, utilization (e.g., classroom use), manipulation, or control. … we should be proactive in seeking to understand the recursive relationship that exists between educator SNS participation and educator identity and ask hard questions of forces that seek to influence our digital participation and the resultant identity constellations that represent our complicated, fragmented, and authentic selves.” That would be from The fragmented educator 2.0: Social networking sites, acceptable identity fragments, and the identity Constellation article, and it’s quite an interesting read if you’re interested in the topic.

For now, though, stay away from the internet if you feel like it. You don’t owe it to anyone to live a digital life.

1. Assumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship | The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning