What I like about Pinterest is the ability to create a collection in collaboration with someone else instead of gathering pictures on my own. Such behaviour allows me to get access to more content that I would have maybe not encountered if I was searching for it on my own as both my friend and I’s algorithms are at work. I think it is an element that could be integrated into Pocket as I would love to share articles with my friend by creating a common collection instead of sending her the link of every article which will get lost in our text conversation.

Pocket on the other hand allows users to post articles and gather them in their own collections but does not enable them to share their collections with others which limits the reach of the articles compared to Pinterest where the sharing is a never ending process.

Both platforms have a similar design which makes one easy to use if you have used the other one. Although each of them is designed to meet the needs of users according to the content, I think Pinterest is the most efficient and is likely to be the most adapted for social media users as it has similarities with other platforms. 

Youtube is a platform that allows users to publish videos online, however long they are. The content on this social media is diverse ranging from fashion to food blogging or tutorials and many more. Creating a video and publishing it on Youtube was easy and only takes a few steps as I got to discover while completing my portfolio. A paper from 2018 by Gleason and von Gillern suggests that “a connection between out-of-school social media practices with in-school traditional citizenship curricula” (201) can exist. Indeed, back in high school when I was preparing for my final exams, I used Youtube as a platform for learning. I remember watching videos made by teachers explaining philosophy which were recommended to me by my teachers. These videos brought me new information and got me to learn in a new way that was more visual than what I was used to. This part of the portfolio illustrated how social media were not only meant for social behaviour but could have a real impact on my digital citizen behaviour. It also showed me that there is a need for new information formats these days due to the high number of information that is now available. In the video “Most Popular Social Media Platforms 1997 - 2020” posted by the channel CaptainGizmo (2020), we can see that Reddit used to be one of the most popular social media platforms. However, over the past 10 years, social media based on visual information rather than textual information has risen to the top of the rankings, showing once again that information needs to be eye-catching to be noticed nowadays. As a digital citizen, I think creating videos could be an efficient way to create and share information in a format that I am not used to using. 

Creating a personalised map in Google maps is something that I have done in the past when I planned a trip to Italy. I extracted coordinates from restaurants, monuments and hotels and compiled them into a csv file that I then uploaded into Google maps. Going into this activity, I thus had some prior knowledge and was able to upload and exploit the file provided about the Heritage Oak trees in Ireland. More than being a useful tool for our own use, mashup maps can be a great way of compiling information of our choice and displaying it on a map. As a student, I have been asked in the past to provide information about certain subjects but could not find premade graphics and maps that truly corresponded with what I needed to argue. Thus, I think that I will use google maps and Datawrapper to create my own informational maps, from information that I will have gathered from trusted sources, so as to illustrate my writing and make my presentation less word-centred and more visual. 

Ansari & Khan (2020) explain that university students often lean on social media for their academic work instead of only for recreational purposes which has shown to enhance their engagement in collaborative learning. So, by incorporating the use of social media into my learning, I am also deepening my engagement as a digital citizen by creating content from pre-existing information. Even though Google maps may not correspond to the traditional idea we have of a social media, it can become one when information is added in it beyond simple geographical information. In addition, these maps can be shared with other people who can all collaborate on it by adding more information, thus showing that collaboration on social media is a great way of building soft skills while learning from others (Brown McWhorter, 2023).

Bogers, T., & van den Bosch, A. (2009). Collaborative and Content-based Filtering for Item Recommendation on Social Bookmarking Websites . Recommender Systems & the Social Web, (826), 9–16.

Gizmo. C. [CaptainGizmo]. (2020, May 18). Most Popular Social Media Platforms 1997 - 2020 [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/ihnUg0_eS8Q 

Gleason, B., & von Gillern, S. (2018). Digital Citizenship with Social Media: Participatory Practices of Teaching and Learning in Secondary Education. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 21(1), 200–212. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26273880

Brown McWhorter, C. (2023, Jul. 15). 7 ways students can use social media in positive ways. The Alabama Baptist. https://thealabamabaptist.org/7-ways-students-can-use-social-media-in-positive-ways/ 

Paun, G (2020, Jul. 2). Building A Brand: Why A Strong Digital Presence Matters. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2020/07/02/building-a-brand-why-a-strong-digital-presence-matters/?sh=bec4ddd49f26

You have the right to access personal data at any given moment and have information about how it is stored and who it is shared with. You have the right to control how it is used and have the ability to opt-out of certain data collection or sharing practices. 

You can decide at any given time to delete personal data from Instagram and remove them the right to exploit it. You may access this data and correct it if it turns out to be inaccurate or incomplete. 

Instagram does not have access to your private messages and cannot exploit them. 

Instagram cannot extract information from your data to provide you with targeted advertising without prior authorization from you.

Instagram cannot share personal data to third parties without your permission.

You have the right to emit a complaint if any of your privacy rights are violated and seek compensation or redress for the harm caused by these violations.

Instagram has the obligation to monitor content posted on its platform and ensure that none of it violates the privacy rights of any user. If any photo, video or comment is in breach with the privacy policy, it needs to be taken down and evaluated further.

As the online world is constantly changing, it is important to stay up-to-date with trends so as to not fall behind (What is digital strategy, 2024). Personally, I have not often followed trends on the internet and especially on social media. However, while working on identifying trends in this module, I realised that I did not even know what a trend exactly was. Indeed, for me a trend was just something that many people were doing on social media like a dance. However, this module has helped me get a better understanding about trends and the many forms they can appear under. I understand that they are not silly but are worth taking a look at as they can have a positive impact (Vandenbosch et al., 2022). The one trend I have started to adopt is the one of authenticity as it is a trend that has been on the rise in recent years and seems to be at the centre of attention more and more. In the future, my goal is to continue to delve into trends that are popular and correspond to my beliefs and try to predict the ones that will come next as it improves my experience on social media and can help me define my future social strategy.

Learning about privacy in this module opened my eyes about the decisions I made online. Like many other people, I never read the privacy policies before agreeing to them, I scroll over them until I reach the consent button at the end as I know that, if I refuse, I will not get access to the platform that is behind it (Obar & Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2020). In hindsight, I have realised that I do not have any idea of what information I have consented to share in the past. This module has helped me understand the issues that can arise with these privacy policies. I have already taken action and reviewed some of the privacy settings on my social media accounts so as to make information about me less public and accessible as I do not want my address or other personal information to be floating around the Internet. Indeed, I knew that every internet user had a digital footprint, however, I was not aware of how much information you could have available about yourself without knowing it was available. Indeed, I thought that, as most of my accounts were private, you could not access information about me easily when in reality information can be accessed by anyone who has a bit of knowledge about the Internet and some IT skills (Hetler, 2024). Because of this, I decided to look into erasing some of my personnel information and the data linked to it on the internet as well as monitoring my digital footprint so it is harder for people and/or companies to access it. In the future, I aim to spend more time reading privacy policies before signing them so I know what is done with my data and what I can do if I want to control it as I have not been mindful of that enough in the past.

Hetler, A. (2024, April 23). 6 common social media privacy issues. TechTarget. https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/6-common-social-media-privacy-issues

Namugenyi, C. et al. (2019). Design of a SWOT Analysis Model and its Evaluation in Diverse Digital Business Ecosystem Contexts. Procedia Computer Science, 159. 1145–1154.

Obar, J. A., & Oeldorf-Hirsch, A. (2020). The biggest lie on the Internet: ignoring the privacy policies and terms of service policies of social networking services. Information, Communication & Society, 23(1), 128–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1486870

Vandenbosch, L., Fardouly, J., & Tiggemann, M. (2022). Social media and body image: Recent trends and future directions. Current opinion in psychology, 45, 101289.

What is digital strategy & here are 8 ultimate ways for success. (2024, February) IMD. https://www.imd.org/reflections/what-is-digital-strategy/