This university semester, I completed the class ‘Social Networking for Information Professionals’ (INF506). Going into the subject, I felt confident about my success, primarily because of my personal experience with social media, both personally and semi-professionally, managing a self-made brand online. However, I was also incredibly interested in how the application of my current skills would transfer to a much more professional setting, with my budding career as an information professional.
Finding My Professional Online Identity
Because of my prior experience, which includes founding and running a blog and brand, I felt incredibly comfortable approaching this class’s second assessment piece, in which we had to create our own professional blog. However, during the proofreading stage of completing Assignment 2, I realised how much I had truly benefited from this course.
My first Online Learning Journal post, Can Social Media Participation Enhance LGBTQ+ Youth Well-Being?: A Journal Article Analysis (Lilley, 2021a), is still incredibly embedded in a clear academic style of writing. However, as I wrote more posts to complete this assignment, my ‘blogging’ voice came through. I didn’t realise that I would struggle to find a comfortable balance between my causal blog-style of writing and my more professional, academic writing. But I feel as though I truly developed this, which can be seen in my later blog posts (see If the Future of Information is DNA, Where Do Public Libraries Fit? (Lilley, 2021b)).
I found this difficulty interesting, as it is something that I have also found reflected in my previous use of Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. While I have previously accessed professional information and sources using these platforms, I have always felt it difficult to engage and find my ‘voice’ interacting with such content. Perhaps this is partly due to my current novice role as an information professional (I have only recently gained paid employment within the discipline and am yet to commence working). But perhaps it is also because there is, at least for myself, a disconnect between my online ‘professional self’, my online ‘personal self’ and the brands that I run online.
This is not an original concept; professional literature has been exploring what it means to build a “professional identity” online that is separate, and largely different, from any personal identity that may already exist (Benson & Morgan, 2015; Davis, 2016). One study looked at almost 200 academics and their social media profiles finding that professionals typically fall into three key “fragments” (Jordan, 2019). These fragments are primarily personal, semi-professional and primarily professional, and tend to differ based on what platform they are presenting on (although many users were found to have several accounts on the same platform to clearly determine these different identities). This just further illustrates to me that many professionals find it most effective to create separate personal and professional online identities.
Based on this knowledge and the experience I gained throughout the duration of this course, I feel that it is likely the best course for me to create separate ‘professional’ accounts for these platforms I wish to engage with as an information professional, to fully embrace what online communities have to offer information professionals.
Growing Alongside Other Professionals Online
In addition to this exploration of how I present as a professional online, I also gained a strong sense of what I feel is the most important benefit of social media use as a professional – the ability to grow and expand knowledge via collaboration.
This is a point that really grabbed me while I was reading the non-fiction book by John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed (Green, 2021). Within this book, Green talks about the classic book The Great Gatsby and how the story has stood the test of time because of different perceptions of the story and its key themes being applied to widely different circumstances throughout time. At this point, I began drawing parallels with how information professionals utilize social media to do much the same thing.
Many professionals can approach the same topic and, with their various perspectives and experience, finding different applications or approaches to the same idea. This is something that I found demonstrated throughout the course, with many students approaching the same Online Learning Journal Tasks with very different outcomes. For example, I came across two fellow students (Flack, 2021; Williams, 2021) who completed the same Online Journal Task, “Information Trends”, as I had also completed. Despite our similar background as INF506 students, all three of us chose a different combination of trends to discuss in our posts. And even when we did overlap on the trends we felt should be further discussed, we came to different conclusions of how it impacted information professionals. By reading these posts, I found ideas and concepts that I had not initially had on my own, despite completing the same task.
This phenomenon is also demonstrated on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, where many professionals may respond to the same comment or shared article with widely varying approaches. And because of the way social media allows discussion to build and grow, quite often these different professionals (who may otherwise not interact, whether due to different professional spaces of geographic location) build off each other and create entirely new ideas. In this way, I see the primary benefit of social media is as a tool that facilitates the basis of knowledge evolution, in which people build off each other’s ideas and/or knowledge to create something that would not have been possible as a single person.
In conclusion, I have learnt a lot throughout this course, from the readings I completed to the ideas and concepts I was exposed to – not just by the course material itself, but also from discussions and shared knowledge from my fellow students. The primary lessons I gained from the course, both of which will be incredibly beneficial within my professional journey were that; an online professional identity is something to grow and develop, and quite often with vastly differ from other personal identities on social media, and that social media is a tool that can encourage and facilitate rapid growth of knowledge and expansion of ideas if we choose to engage with it.
References.
Benson, V. & Morgan, S. (2015). Implication of Social Media Use in Personal and Professional Settings, IGI Global. doi: 10.4018/978-1-4666-7401-1
Davis, J. S. (2016). Building a Professional Teaching Identity on Social Media: A Digital Constellation of Selves. SensePublishers.
Flack, M. (2021). OLJ Task 13: Information Trends. Retrieved from https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/csurtc/2021/05/09/olj-task-13-information-trends/
Green, J. (2021). The Anthropocene Reviewed [Audiobook]. Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group.
Jordan, K. (2019). Imagined audiences, acceptable identity fragments and merging the personal and professional: How academic online identity is expressed through different social media platforms. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(2), 165-178. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2020.1707222
Lilley, R. (2021a). Can Social Media Participation Enhance LGBTQ+ Youth Well-Being?: A Journal Article Analysis. Retrieved from https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/yareadingguide/2020/03/06/journal-analysis/
Lilley, R. (2021b). If the Future of Information is DNA, Where Do Public Libraries Fit?. Retrieved from https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/yareadingguide/2021/05/05/if-the-future-of-information-is-dna-where-do-public-libraries-fit/
Williams, K. (2021). OLJ 13: Information Trends. Retrieved from https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/kerianne/2021/05/15/olj-13-information-trends/comment-page-1/#comment-7