My Online Footprint

With the internet giving reach to a seemingly infinite number of things to search, I have spent a lot of time browsing in my life.  I have a busy online life, as I have emails for Google, Yahoo, and High Point University.  For varying purposes, I use all of these emails to create accounts for various sites, such as ESPN and Hulu.  For anything relating to my academic life, such as PurpleBriefcase or LinkedIn, I will obviously use my HPU email to log in.  For personal matters, I mostly use the Yahoo email, and Google is mostly for class projects and work-related matters.  I will give my email, as well as phone numbers, to established and trustworthy sites like Disney+ and American Airlines since they're either free or give me content I am looking for.  Even with these sites possibly sharing my data to third parties, I've come to accept that the sort of thing is rampant in online culture today, and even if that's a terrible sign of normalization, it's just something that I, and most people, don't really care to pay attention to.  I mostly read my HPU email account for information since that relates to me more than any other; I don't receive mail from Google and most of my inbox for Yahoo is junk anyway.  This leaves my HPU email the most looked at, and Blackboard as my most visited site.  Aside from BB, Yahoo, and ESPN, most of my online presence is left to be on social media.  

Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and SnapChat for social media, plus Tik Tok now since I've been incredibly bored the past few weeks.  Each site varies in terms of the content I put on it, so while I may post something funny on Twitter or Snapchat, I'll often be more serious in my posts on Facebook and LinkedIn.  For the latter sites, those will involve more links to articles and videos I see or things I do that I want to share, while I just talk about basically anything on Twitter and Instagram.  This leaves impressions from outside viewers to be mostly mixed: people on Twitter may think I'm funny or stupid, while those on Facebook may see me as more serious.  

Considering the article from The Atlantic, there are some very good points that I think I fit into.  Even with the friends and followers I have online, I never really interact with them.  Occasionally, the things I post are for attention so that people may find me humorous or interesting.  I have fallen into that hole of wanting attention and doing a whole bunch of stuff for it, which I have come to regret at times.  It's not so much that I'm lonely, but that I want to reach out to people, which I think is the unintended message of the article.  In addition, being present also affects my mental state quite often.  Pretty much all of the news is terrible these days, so it bums me out frequently to see all the bad in the world.  Even with some of the things in my life getting me really upset, I feel worse for the reports I see on social media since they're often more severe and consequential than the negatives in my life.  I don't really feel lonely, but the desire to gain attention certainly doesn't help in regards to how I display myself online.