Who are you in real life? Who are you on social media?
Everyone in the twenty-first century have dual identities: A reality one and a virtual one.
The digital era has forced open a door for voices to be heard. A person who is an introvert in real life can absolutely be the complete opposite in the virtual world. In other words, someone so shy to speak in public can have the loudest and most active voices on social media platforms. I am sure that we all know someone who may be very shy in real life, where they are not so good at social interactions. Yet, on social platforms like Facebook, they can write paragraphs of eloquent words describing some political situation that is happening or their major struggles in life as a lost soul searching for purpose.
When we talk about identity, we now pair it with digital literacy, where people present themselves a different way on the internet. This is manifested through Wan Shun Evan Lam (2000), where this TESOL Quarterly article talks about how teenagers design their own identity via the internet through their second language. In fact, the author states that “identity formation” is congruent with “literacy development” (Lam, 2000, p. 457). What exactly does this mean? How I comprehend is that both are types of developments that grow parallel of each other. When one grows, the other one also grows. Identity and literacy make an intimate pair that can be further developed in the virtual world where essentially speaking, the learner can become “anyone” they desire.
So who can learners be when they are digitally literate? They can become activists and advocates who challenges social issues that their real-world identity faces in real life. Haddix and Sealey-Ruiz (2012) states in Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy that digital literacy empowers African American male students, where they use the familiarity of the internet to identify problems worth bringing into the classroom. African American students re-address their identity through rewriting their stories like “this is where I’m from” and “this is where I’m going” (Haddix and Sealey-Ruiz, 20120, p. 191). Similarly in a classroom with Hispanic minorities, the use of digital and media literacies also help to strengthen their own identities through counteracting the problematic domination such as “White supremacy, police brutality, and the oppression of women” (Rios, 2018, p. 369) from the journal, Learning, Media, and Technology.
The two journal articles, which one addresses African American students and one addresses Hispanic students, as well as the Lam article that addresses Asian students — what this all shows is the benefits of digital literacy. All of these people, who are minorities, struggle greatly with their identity — especially a tug-a-war between their native identity and the “Western identity”. Digital literacy hence, becomes an outlet and a safe space for students to form any identity, which can be hybrid if they desire, to address the issues that their identities experience in real life. Having an outlet is absolutely important for students today.
So what is YOUR digital identity? Who are YOU?
References
De los Ríos, C. V. (2018). Bilingual vine making: Problematizing oppressive discourses in a secondary Chicanx/Latinx studies course. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(4), 359–373. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1498350
Haddix, M., & Sealey-Ruiz, Y. (2012). Cultivating digital and popular Literacies as empowering and emancipatory acts among urban youth. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 56(3), 189–192. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.00126
Lam, W. S. (2000). L2 literacy and the design of the self: A case study of a teenager writing on the internet. TESOL Quarterly, 34(3), 457–482. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587739