1. How might your digital footprint affect your future opportunities? Give at least two examples.

There’s a lot of ways your digital footprint could affect your future, and one example is the one they’ve scared us with since elementary school- nothing you post on social media ever really goes away, so if you share something inappropriate or regrettable, there’s always a chance that it could resurface at the worst possible moment and flip people’s perception of you for the worse.  Another way your digital footprint can negatively impact your life is another thing we’ve been scolded about since we were young; if you spend too much time in the digital world, if you live as a person made of pixels, posts, and masks of all kinds, your life, your body, your livelihood in the real world will waste away.  Since the world is beginning to incorporate technology more and more into day-to-day life, it’s important to strike a balance- not enough of a digital footprint will leave you woefully unprepared for the future, but too much of one will make you simply glide past, foregoing priceless experiences and interactions for half- truths, fantasies, and limited time poured into things that aren’t as real as you want them to be.

2. Describe at least three strategies that you can use to keep your digital footprint appropriate and safe.

For one, if you’re unsure if something you’re about to share is appropriate and safe, you could always grab a friend or someone you trust and make them look over what you’re thinking and get a second opinion on whether or not it’s a good idea- bad ideas are good ideas until proven otherwise by someone with common sense.  Another way you could keep your digital footprint squeaky clean is being genuinely yourself- yeah, that sounds a bit out of place, but if you’re sharing things online that reflect who you really are, things that you really do believe in, things you really like, then you’re probably way less likely to post something regrettable if you put adequate thought into it and how it reflects you.  A third way to ensure that your online presence is a good one is to just be nice to people.  That might also sound a bit out of place, but the way you interact with others basically shapes the space you make for yourself in the world.  So many peoples across all sorts of platforms have wrecked their own lives by being rude, crass, or downright cruel to others, and especially in a digital world where your every move can be screen capped and reported, that makes this threat all the more possible.  When your mom told you that “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t day anything at all”, she had a point.  It’s true, some things just need to be said, but it is exceedingly important to really think things through when saying something even mildly sarcastic, because you never know how it could be interpreted.

3. If you could go back in time, is there anything you would do differently online? Think of what type of advice you would pass on to your younger self or other students. How could you go about explaining it to them?

I’ve personally never really had a huge online presence- I have an Instagram that I post my art on, and we all have a few less than stellar photos we’ve been tagged in, but there’s nothing really that I would have not posted or not said.  Kids these days are getting bolder with what they casually share to millions of strangers, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but some things just aren’t as big of a deal to the younger generations as they were to older ones.  People are going to make mistakes in this evolution- it’s how we learn- but if I had to pass down any advice on this matter to people younger than me on this matter, it would be this: don’t grow up too fast.  Another seemingly out of place tip, but hear me out.  Online, you’re whoever you say you are, and there’s always been an obsession with acting older, acting like a teenager, acting like an adult, and trying to seem mature and worthy of attention has been a trend among the young for generations.  This is where I’m going with this:  most of the regrettable things said and done out there were to seem mature, intelligent, worthy of the attention of whoever comes across them.  Don’t be in a rush to become who you’ll grow into, let things happen naturally or it will only end in pain.