What is Digital Citizenship?
Digital citizenship is kinda laid out completely in the name alone. Just like how citizenship is how you act in real life, digital citizenship is how you act and behave online to others and in general. This can be a simple action of commenting on something someone else posts, or posting something yourself such as a video, text, etc. Granted there are two types of digital citizenship, those being bad and good. Bad digital citizenship often involves posting hateful content or comments, and just overall being a horrible person online. Good citizenship on the other hand, is quite literally the exact opposite of what I just said about bad citizenship where you post bad stuff, in good citizenship you post or comment nice supportive content.
What is digital footprint, and how does it affect your digital citizenship?
Think of a snow-covered landscape, except it never snows and the ground is permanently covered in snow and can’t be covered up with more snow, and the snow can’t be melted or removed. Every step you take is leaving more and more footprints that permanently alter the snow, but I digress. In the digital world think of those permanent footprints you leave in the snow as anything you do online, for example: going to a website, clicking on a link, posting a comment, watching a video, listening to a podcast, posting your own videos, texts, or podcasts, etc. Virtually anything you do online is catalogued and is never truly deleted. Even though you technically can delete it from your side somebody anywhere could have screenshotted or recorded it and repost it, and with such websites like “Wayback Machine” that allows people to literally go back in time to view old content that people have since deleted due to reasons unknown. (I would add a link to the wayback machine, but my school has decided to unfortunately block it for reasons unbeknownst to me)
How digital citizenship affects your real life.
There are a multitude of ways that digital citizenship can affect your life and a lot of it is more than just online. Let’s go back to that snowy landscape really quickly. Everything is going smoothly with people leaving their footprints. Everything is in order, but then you just decide to throw a boatload of grime and dirt where you leave your footprints. That said grime and dirt will NEVER go away. People look into this and of course as you would be, are promptly disgusted at all this dirt desecrating their arctic landscape. As the internet does, they eventually bully you off the internet, oh well just make a new account right? Wrong, people can and will find out it was you over time. “Well, I can just leave the internet, right?” The second reason is that when someone inevitably recognizes you in real life, they’re going to relentlessly bully you there as well. Your best bet is just to lay low for a while and hope the whole thing dies down and gets pushed under the rug “Maybe I can get a job right?” Nope! Jobs will search and when I say search I really mean search like they’ll search really deep into your internet history, and when they find all that grime they will absolutely reject your job offering, leaving you a jobless individual who can never get your normal life back.
Conclusion.
In conclusion, you really don’t want to be a horrible person on the internet as it will haunt you forever. Genuinely I don’t understand why people can be so vile and malevolent on the internet as being a good person is really not that hard to accomplish when all it takes is just some good words and some empathy. Overall, just be a good person in life and online it can only do good for you and others.