You ain’t seen the last of me!

January 11, 2015 nabeels7 Leave a comment

So this is it, this module is over but my online journey is just out of its embryonic stage. Andale! Andale! I go onwards to the digital frontier enlightened with new skills and ideas gleaned from this experience and the students who shared this journey alongside me.

Facebook is my private social network and I keep it separate from the professional presence I want to create. 4 months in my tweets have grown from a mere 4 to 56, amateurish you might say but a good start for a shy guy like me. Going forward I will look to tweet more and be frank and opinionated because the name of the game is attention and to generate interest.

My connections on LinkedIn have grown to 12 from absolutely nothing less than 6 months ago (I have added 30 business cards to my offline network so far). As is the norm with the financial industry the current way to increase my connections is to build an offline network when I graduate. Interacting with firms on Twitter will likely give me a head start though and I intend to pursue this in the meantime.

I realised after my first blog post and watching Miley Cyrus that it pays to be noticed so I switched to a more “controversial” and informal style compared to my contemporaries, views in excess of 200 have hopefully vindicated my approach. I have become far more confident in expressing my views to complete strangers as a result of my experience with blogging, I have been reticent in the past but that has changed, blogging has given my personality more substance and conviction.

A lot of other blogs experimented with different styles as we navigated the course, choosing to experiment with powtoon, weebly, prezi, vlogs etc. I considered such an approach but decided otherwise because I wanted to appear serious and be taken seriously. I think about it now though and it feels like a wrong approach, getting noticed should be the main priority and any way that I can engage the reader should have been utilised so it’s very much a case of an opportunity missed but one I intend to rectify going forward.

The reality is that I’m advertising myself to the professionals in the City of London and relationships are formed through personal contact and meetings. Social networks are making inroads but face to face networking is king and it’s a reason why my online presence wasn’t too noticeable before. But times they are a changing, and I intend to continue blogging, tweet my musings to the wide world and create an about.me page to get a head start from other graduates and for this I’m delighted I took this module and picked up a wider understanding of the digital realm.

Digital Piracy for the Win!!!

December 14, 2014 nabeels7 Leave a comment

Two momentous events happened this week, Pirate Bay went under (hopefully not for long) and I considered why I use peer-to-peer sites to share files.

The Pirate Bay may be down but the idea it created of free and collaborative internet has taken root amongst us and the new generation and an idea will never die. Dominic talked about how the film and music industry is under threat from file sharing websites but he oversimplified a nuanced scenario in the entertainment industry. It is true that revenues has fallen in the internet era but they are still very high. The recent Sony hacking (this is the third one I believe) revealed that for every $1billion invested by the company, the rate of return is $500million. Let me tell you, that is a rate of return any company will absolutely kill for! Musicians make a higher proportion of their money from live performances nowadays, file sharing has made musicians work harder for their money, “pirates” have made them more productive! I’m not surprised that musicians and actors are complaining, they miss the old days of working a few months a year and them fucking off to live the high life.

I did consider this week why I don’t buy music or films digitally. If I like a movie I go watch it in the cinema and pay around £10 which is an exorbitant price based on monopoly power, but I still pay it because I’m going for an experience. If i don’t consider the experience to merit the extortionate price them I share it online from someone who paid for it. I have every right to test a product before plumping my minimal student loan into it. And that is my second point, I’m a student and with the high living costs and the crippling debt I will look to save money where ever I can, its simple economics.

So, did I learn anything this week? I learned about people’s viewpoints on this topical issue but I’m unmoved. I simply respond to rational economic situations and incentives to reduce the costs to me while increasing my satisfaction. And until my income increases or the extortionate pricing for albums and movies declines I will not buy them (unless it’s my flat-mate Scotson Pike’s music!).

Create and Share!

December 7, 2014 nabeels7 8 Comments

I have never bought a movie or album online, ever but I listen to music online everyday and I’m a massive film buff. This is a blog that is publicly available and no doubt an employer will peruse one day so I’m going to self censor myself now.

Is it wrong to share what you own with whoever you want to? Billion $ conglomerates will tell you with a straight face that sharing what you own is wrong . Before the internet we shared our VHS and cassette tapes with our friends/family and it fine and had a negligible impact on the profits of content providers. The Pirate Bay allowed us to share our property with the whole world, suddenly profits fell and sharing was illegal. Once I purchase a product I have every right to give it to whoever I like, this is a fundamental concept of private property ownership.

Disney completely missing the irony in this cartoon!

I have just started my dissertation and I have struggled to find open access journals to do my research. Paywalls are denying knowledge to an overwhelming majority and holding human progress in check. At the time of writing Charlie Mason has covered this, so check it out.

Open access content allows creators to reach a bigger audience faster, for the younger generation cost of content is the major deterrent to access, driving these people to P2P websites. CreativeCommons, YouTube and Twitch.tv are prime examples of free content creating exposure and knowledge within the legal framework. Smosh and PewDiePie are millionaires because open access has allowed them to reach a vast audience according to the WallStreetJournal.

If content is blocked or behind paywalls then knowledge and experiences aren’t shared, ignorance reigns. The internet is egalitarian, its liberty and freedom and these core tenets are strengthened through open access.

Global Interdependence for all?

December 2, 2014 nabeels7 Leave a comment

Aumar Mustafa

Ethics – A system of moral principles that branch off philosophy. Dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and the goodness and badness of other motives and ends of such actions. [1]

Global connectivity has undoubtedly made the world a better place. People can exchange goods without the need for cash. Conversations can occur between two people from different ends of the planet. The growth of the internet means that we bared witness to the greatest skydive known to man.[2] Irrespective of all the benefits, too much of a good thing is always bad and the rise of global interdependency has given rise to some social-economic problems.

How can we exist in a world where the richest 85 people own more of the world’s wealth than the poorest 3.5 billion? [3] How can we exist in a world where more…

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Am I smarter this week?

November 30, 2014 nabeels7 2 Comments

Ethics are hard to discuss when the social media is barely out of its infancy. We are still getting used to be globally connected, interacting with other cultures whose sense of ethics vastly differs from ours. Calum alluded to this when he suggested in hs comment o Adam’s blog that what’s right and the norm in the UK would be against the very fibre of being in another culture.

The vast majority of internet denizens forget that businesses, whether they are present online or physcally, are not people. Morality and ethics are secondary concerns to most profit-seeking businesses. Like I mentioned in my post, Facebook are exploiting the data of their users to generate revenue or facilitate government spying. The market isn’t convinced what Facebook’s revenue model is and share price has plummeted since the IPO, so ethical use of user data has taken a backseat as revenue needs to be generated. So, I hope that anyone reading my post realises this and reflects on the fact that ethics are a secondary concern to global social media conglomerate and people need to be wary of the faustian pact we have made with Facebook.

What have I learnt? I read Calum’s blog and realised that in a large scale decentralized protest movement on the internet can degenrate very quickly if participants do not behave ethically. Rape and death threat’s bought down the GamerGate movement and true message was lost, if everyone had behaved sensibly the subject wouldn’t have shifted to harassment of women.

I did gain an insight into cyber bullying of both teachers and students from Anna’s vlog and Nam’s post. My mother is a teacher and before this week I had never considered that disgruntled parents may have a bone to grind with teachers. Mum has managed to keep personal and professional online identity separate until now so I’m sure she’ll be insulated from abuse.

Ethics? What Ethics?!

November 23, 2014 nabeels7 4 Comments

As personal social media use has exploded, businesses have spotted an opportunity. They have never had such an access to free and personal information on consumers, the data is genuine, easily accessible and best of all costs nothing. Products and services can now be tailored for individual consumers with information obtained from their posts, clicks and cookies.

There most prominent ethical issues attached to business use of social media relate to abuse of privacy/consumer data, faking/misreporting endorsements and causing offense.

This TIME magazine article points out the ways in which Facebook abuses the consumer data it has like keeping the data forever, forcing profile to be visible on search results etc. I wasn’t aware of this level of snooping from Facebook so I have taken the decision to remove Facebook apps/plugins from every device that I own.

The golden rule of Twitter/Facebook posts for is to never offend large groups of people especially if your posts can bring your employer into disrepute. #hasjustinelandedyet was a prominent case where the offending tweeter was fired and a more recent case would be a Labour MP damaging Labour’s election prospects by not anticipating an inevitable backlash after posting this image on Twitter. These are of course a classic examples of the boundary between personal and professional identities blurring to the extent where nothing is private and every time you are online you represent your employer.

Celebrity endorsements are big business as they generate revenue for companies who can rely on dedicated celebrity fans to gobble up their products. These endorsements are carefully crafted so as to appear sincere and fool followers, an example of unreported endorsement. Fake endorsement, as exposed by Dispatches, is the buying of Facebook likes by brands to generate fake popularity.

Unethical use of social media by businesses boils down to generating endorsements while misleading consumers on their sincerity, publishing offending content and invasion of privacy by content providers.

What I learned this week

November 16, 2014 nabeels7 Leave a comment

Some really interesting posts this week with Anna’s post being the most creative and Jess’s post being the most user friendly. A lot of blogs mentioned the usual culprits of Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn and the importance of having an updated and connected profiles so that we are easier to find.

Andy mentioned that it’s very difficult to get your profile noticed on google if you have a common name. I googled myself following Anna’s question and found that I’m not even on the first page! There were loads of people with exactly the same name as me and here I was thinkinh that my name was exotic and uncommon. In all seriousness employers would probably fail to find me if they didn’t have a picture of me. Perhaps my insistence of privacy over popularity may have financial drawbacks for me in the future.

I focused on my LinkedIn and Twitter profiles and how to engage businesses online to get noticed. I’m currently building my LinkedIn by getting connections and building my network and I learned a valuable lesson this week. Right now I’m in the process of applying for jobs in the banking sector and I thought that my LinkedIn would show that I had connections and experience. But LinkedIn has been completely irrelevant to the job applications so far, I am put through the usual gamut of filling online applications, taking psychometric tests and brown nosing the companies. This just confirms to me that digital profiles are so far only relevant to the creative industries, industries requiring academic rigour simply are not bothered about how visible you are online. The old fashioned approach may have some utility but it lacks foresight, no wonder we see little change in the banking sector if the recruitment system itself is rigid.

I may have learned something about my online professional identity this week but I don’t know what the point of online professional identity is after my recent experience.

Hire Me Please!

November 9, 2014 nabeels7 5 Comments

Most of us are at that stage where we are actively job hunting for next year. The economic outlook may be improving but competition is fierce and I’m busy trying to make myself stand out. And to stand out these days it’s an absolute necessity to have a heavy online presence. Websites like about.me and LinkedIn are redefining job hunting in the digital age, LinkedIn is the market leader with 332 million users; Nik Nyman pointed out in his blog that “94% of all recruiters use LinkedIn to search for candidates”.

The first thing I was told on my first day at my internship was that I had to network relentlessly and LinkedIn was the tool to use to advertise myself. You set up your profile and list your skills and experience and your colleagues and network endorse your skills, so potential employers know your skills/experience and have references to back it up. It’s an effective setup that is becoming increasingly popular amongst most employers. In the end I managed to get endorsements from 8 or so senior investment professionals and when I apply to corporate finance roles later in the year, employers can see my LinkedIn profile and see that I’m good enough to be endorsed by respected professionals.

Another way to increase your professional presence is to follow employers on Twitter and Facebook and engage with them regularly. In the past when people would go to an interview you would have to demonstrate why you wanted to join but online engagement has made this much easier and increased our visibility to employers. Searle (2006) points out that engagement can create “positive reactions to the firm” and “shape new employees psycholocial contracts” with the firm.

It isn’t just about creating LinkedIn profiles, prospective employees must engage with brands and market themselves like products to stand out, we must understand that we are a commodity in the labour market (a bit soul destroying, but essentially the reality) and differentiate ourselves.

Reflections on Online Identity

November 2, 2014 nabeels7 Leave a comment

There are many issue addressed in the blogs ranging from the practicalities of having multiple identites to the pitfalls of having your online identities overlap to give a less than flattering account of oneself to a prospective employer.

I found that Andy’s example about having a main authentic identity coupled with a few anonymous/pseudonymous identities to be identical to my own online existence. Andy’s assertion that for most people all their identities are converging towards one main identity to be a very insightful observation and one that I hadn’t considered before. His insight made me consider my own online presence, the number of active profiles I am able to maintain has diminished and now I find myself relying mostly on my Google/Facebook identity. Jess’s view that our multiple online personas create a vast digital footprint making it impractical to have multiple identities resonates with the previous point.

I found Pippa’s blog about the uses of partial identity to cater to a specific audiences to be a good point that I alluded to in my post. A similar vein of thought was evident in other blogs where the advice was to keep personal and professional identities separate.

In my discussion with Charlie we discussed the merits of anonymity online, where I argued that the only way to foster frank debate online was to be anonymous. Both Charlie and Andy raised the point in the comments that we should be accountable to the things we say. Initially I was against this view but in light of constant stream of news about trolling on Twitter and GamerGate, I have come round to their way of thinking.

As i move forward I suspect that an authentic online presence is more useful for online interactions, they give us credibility and makes us more visible.

https://nabeels7.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/theres-so-many-of-me/#comments

http://pippaedavies.wordpress.com/

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6111065/gamergate-explained-everybody-fighting

http://charliemasonblog.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/different-identities-for-different-situations/#comments

There’s so many of me!

October 26, 2014 nabeels7 7 Comments

This week I have been tasked with discussing the pros and cons of having multiple online identities. The question is too blunt, it ignores the nuances and the contexts in which we express multiple identities virtually. The issues facing a varied online presence are multifaceted and all virtual interactions have virtues and failings.

Warburton asserts that our “virtual self” is just an accumulation of electronic data – ” the things that we say about ourselves, the things that others say about us” or our interactions with electronic machines online. Our online identity is what we post on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, of course that means that our professional and personal identities are different but the boundaries between them are being blurred.

Facebook and Google are the faces of the personal data economy, collecting and selling our personal information for profit. This is one reason why they insist on creation of an authentic identity, being anonymous doesn’t generate content. Christopher Poole, the creator of 4chan where users post anonymously and there is no archive, dismisses the notion that having multiple identities is “lacking in integrity” like Facebook executives have suggested. I agree with him when he suggests that “identity is prismatic”, because we as humans adapt and evolve our identity based on which social groups we inhabit.

Having an authentic identity doesn’t mean that people are in fact genuine. People behave online like they behave offline, self-censorship is rife and frank thoughts can often be suppressed. In other instances authentic identity has not been a barrier to trolling and vitriolic abuse (generally aimed at women and minorities).

Edward Snowden’s revelations about the mass surveillance and collection of metadata has made the general public more aware of how much our privacy is eroded on the digital world. The more info we give away on the web the more vulnerable we get and herein lies one of the main problems of having multiple identities. The following video is a prime example:

On one of my regular forays into the darknet I came across people who offer whole new identities which are obviously stolen from the data gathered from the web and public records, US Passports/Green Cards go for as little $500, credit card information is even cheaper due to the amount of personal data available to dedicated hackers. There is also a forum dedicated to posting login information stolen from dedicated servers.

This year I have been constantly reminded by colleagues, during my internship, to have LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. This makes you more visible online and employers can infer a lot from my posts and connections about my personality and scan the feed to perform a background check.

It is therefore prudent to have multiple identities online to create a segmented virtual presence, it’s better to limit the extent to which our personal and professional existences interact. For the people concerned about data mining and privacy intrusions from governments and corporations some practical solutions may be in order like using the Ghostery app on Firefox to prohibit websites from collecting data and installing cookies. If you are mildly paranoid you can use the TOR browser to make yourself anonymous online everywhere.