Hooked on Harps
Exegesis
A web presence, or online identity, is how a person presents himself on the Web through various media platforms that manage and share his information, such as social network, photo and bookmark services (Helmond, 2010. p19). As pieces of information or identity are often distributed across various platforms, there is a need for a central hub or node to bring them all together (Helmond, 2010. p19). This may be achieved through using a central website, blog or service such as Friendfeed. For this assignment I have chosen a site from the Wix website builder for my central node, with Twitter, Delicious, Flickr and LibraryThing as my contributing nodes to create my web presence.
I decided to use a website for my central node as websites can be published, maintained, and modified regularly to reflect the changing identity or interests of an individual (Döring, 2002). Wix was my first choice of a website builder as it had the template I wanted to use. A second factor was the site builder’s provision of easy to follow instructions, requiring little more than “a few clicks and some typing” (McAfee, p.25) and access to technical support if needed. For my website, I modified a classical music template to reflect my interest in playing harp. To complement the simple lines of my blue harp around which the home page is based, an uncluttered, blue and white theme is used throughout the website. Links are placed on the home page footer to the other nodes that form part of my web presence. For consistency, each of the nodes uses the same motif and profile, and, where possible, the colours of the central node.
The decision to use a micro-blogging service as one of my nodes was based upon the desire for a conversational platform for exchanging ideas, thoughts or interesting links that I, or other users of the website, may want to publicly share. Twitter has been at the forefront of micro-blogging technology since it was founded in 2006 and gives users the ability to post short messages and links to other sites in real-time updates (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011) in140 characters or less. According to Twitter (Twitter.com, 2013), it has over 200,000,000 active users and 340,000,000 tweets are made each day. Therefore, this widely-used service was the platform of choice as my first node for linking to my website and increasing my web presence.
My second node is Delicious, a bookmarks manager which enables its members to store their bookmarked sites on the Web itself so that they are accessible from anywhere (McAfee, 2006, p.26). Optional tags can be applied by individuals to their bookmarked pages to make them searchable from within their own collection, or for searching the whole Delicious site (Mathes, 2004, p.3) using tags others have given to their bookmarked pages. The concept of user-tagging or folksonomy gives a collaborative approach to categorising sites based upon subjects, or associations of the subject matter, in contrast to taxonomy (O’Reilly, 2007, p.23) or controlled vocabulary. I chose to use Delicious as my bookmarking site for its tagging capability so that I could add descriptor tags to the saved location information of different harp resources, such as harpists, harp makers or music retailers, found on the Web. Another feature on Delicious that influenced my decision to select this site as a link to my central node is its capability of bundling different tags together under a separate heading. This enables my tagged harp resources to be separated from tagged resources in other areas of interest.
Flickr is a photo management and sharing service that uses tagging in a similar way to Delicious. The main difference between the two services is that Delicious users primarily tag third party sites while Flickr is mainly for individuals to maintain their own collection of images (Mathes, 2004, p.3) with the addition of keywords or tags. The ease of use, its ability to be linked to various social network sites and grouping of photos into sets (Adler, 2011) were the main reasons for choosing Flickr for my collection of photos.
The fourth contributing node for my web presence is LibraryThing, a social networking site for book lovers. It is an easy to use book cataloguing site that also allows searches of other members’ collections, with the option to review and tag books in a similar way to Delicious or Flickr. LibraryThing offers the perfect tool for cataloguing my harp books and for searching for names of new ones through using relevant tags, as well as providing a resource to link with others who share my interests.
Members of social network sites construct profiles or identities and links to other people with the connections publicly displayed through images or text (Papacharissi, 2011, p.304), thereby developing their web presence. Yet, the balance between the sharing of identities and protecting privacy needs consideration to minimise adverse reactions such as cyber-bullying and disparaging comments (Kietzmann et al., 2011). Options for privacy and disclosure vary between social network sites (Qian & Scott, 2007, p1430), therefore, it is the user’s decision as to how much information they share publicly. Helmond (2010, p.13) warns that with a public profile, every tweet posted will be indexed by Google and that single tweets appearing in Google can be taken out of context, persisting long after being posted online. Although withholding personal information from online platforms is not a guarantee to anonymity (Qian & Scott, 2007, p1443), I have decided to reveal few details of my identity to help protect my privacy. Hence, I use my first name sparingly, and my user name is based upon my cat’s name.
Developing a consistent web presence takes thoughtful consideration in terms of information that will be publicly available and the choice of media platforms to employ. The contributory nodes linked to my Wix website are Twitter for conveying short messages, Delicious to share bookmarked sites, Flickr to display photos, and LibraryThing for cataloging my music book collection.
