That's Not Meant for You!

I once taught a lesson about social media to a group of high school students. Looking back, it seems silly because I don't feel I'm the most qualified or knowledgeable person when it comes to social media and navigating the internet. There have been several occasions where students have taught me something new.

Yet, I remember when I first entered the social media world... There was no one to teach me how to be safe on the internet. We would post anything and everything on our Myspace page or Facebook wall without ever really considering the consequences. It wasn't until my parents and older family members hopped on Facebook that I realized there were things I was posting that I may not want everyone to see.

Dennen et al. (2017) describe the potential of overlapping of online social groups as context collapse. This was something I frequently pointed out to my students during my lesson on social media (although I just learned the appropriate term for it!). What someone posts or comments or likes or who a person is connected to, can be seen by anyone, even if it was not meant for specific people to see. For the most part, teens are very aware of their online presence, but as engagement and connections on social media increase, I feel like it is also getting increasingly difficult to succeed at separating social groups.

This raises two concerns for me:

1. As an educator, how do I truly succeed at separating my personal accounts and professional accounts? Even if using separate emails, there are consistencies that link my accounts together for students and their families to accidentally stumble across. Even if I am not posting anything inappropriate, there are aspects of my life I prefer to keep separate.

2. The above, but for my students. I don't want to stumble upon a student's (or their family's) account that wasn't meant for me.

Do you separate social groups online? Is there really a way to keep them from overlapping?

Reference

Dennen, V. P., Rutledge, S. A., Bagdy, L. M., Rowlett, J. T., Burnick, S., & Joyce, S. (2017). Context collapse and student social media networks: Where life and high school collide. In Social Media & Society, Toronto, Canada. ACM.