If you have
a Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or even an email account; you are a digital
citizen. By merely using these technologies and others you have branded
yourself a digital citizen. You
elected to be a part this digital community (Facebook, email, etc.) it was not
forced upon. When you sign up for any social media
account or even an email account (personal, work or school) you are required to
agree with certain terms and conditions of that site before you are accepted.
Your consent makes you a part of that community; you are automatically sent an
email welcoming you to the service with your username and password. Once you
are online, there are levels of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. If you
post offensive or inappropriate content and a user reports you; it’s a
violation the agreed on terms and conditions. You will be penalized in various manners
depending on the site.
So, once you
log into your accounts and begin to communicate and exchange information with
others you are exercising your right as digital citizen. The term global
citizenship or digital citizenship implies that traditional concepts of
geography and place are not as important as they used to be to our
understanding of citizenship (Ohler, 2010) .
You are seeing
the notion of geography cast aside in reference to anything digital. People are
now working remotely, attending classes remotely and doctors are even
evaluating and monitoring patients remotely. Your real and digital lives have
crossed pollinated, geography is no longer a barrier but now you don’t know
what is real because so much of your lives are lived through social media. People are entering into long distance
relationships, falling in love and believing they have finally met their
significant others. The relationships are based solely on a series of images,
status updates, and conversations through social media. In some cases, they
have never seen each other and they have never communicated outside of social
media with Skype, FaceTime or even telephone but they claim they are in love.
The focus on
online relationships and how they form has become increasingly popular since the
award winning documentary, Catfish
which is now a weekly television show on MTV. A catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they're
not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities,
particularly to pursue deceptive online romances (Urban Dictionary, 2013) . This practice was
thrust into mainstream headlines a few weeks ago because of an incident
involving a fake
girlfriend hoax against Notre
Dame Linebacker, Manti Te’o.
In the PBS
documentary, Digital Nation: Life on the
Virtual Frontier they “present an in-depth exploration of what it means to
be human in a 21st-century digital world” (PBS , 2010) . Internet usage in
South Korea has become a public healthcare crisis. The government has stepped
in and is now teaching children healthy internet habits. Second graders in
South Korea are taught how to use a computer right around the same time they
are learning to read. They are learning more than just technical functions.
They are learning something every digital citizen should be taught; Digital
Citizenship comes with expectations and responsibilities.
I’m sure Douglas
Rushkoff, author of books on media, technology and culture probably never
thought we would reach this point. Rushkoff, reassured people for decades about
the positives of the digital revolution but now he says, “I want to know
whether or not we are tinkering with something more essential than we
realize." (PBS , 2010)
Sources
PBS . (2010,
February 2). Retrieved from
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/etc/synopsis.html
Urban Dictionary. (2013). Retrieved from
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=catfish
Ohler, J. B. (2010). Digital Community Digital
Citizen. Thousand Oaks: Corwin.
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