Context

Twenty years ago, an online identity could not make or break your relationships with friends, partners or co-workers, because most people did not have a computer let alone instant access to the Internet. With the great power of being able to view and communicate with complete strangers online, comes the responsibility to present yourself at your best.

In the Online Identity Report I analyze my online identity and present an outlined timeline to remove content that does not illustrate my abilities or interest for content that does. By following through with this plan, my goal is that I present myself as an individual who is taken seriously for her interest in public relations and create a habit of only adding content to the Internet that establishes that interest.

Rhetorical Decisions 

In creating my online identity, practicing articulation was most important to me because part of who I strive to represent myself as is someone who is trying to define and use identification in order to understand and make competent arguments. The use of articulation in my social media posts (Facebook and Twitter) encourages the creation of a discourse community.

I wrote the September 2012 Report & Plan as well as the December 2012 Report & Plan as part of a class assignment for Writing Technologies. These documents and the research issued with them were unique in that the assignment was asking me to assess what my identity was if I only knew myself as an online entity.

Conclusion

Through working on this online identity plan, I became interested in how an online identity could be developed through majors. I planned my senior seminar around advising English majors at Elon University on the benefits of creating an online identity and a journal recording my own interactions with social media.