Until now I have not really considered how I sensor myself based on the persons on my different social media platforms. The platforms that has the greatest degree of context collapse are Facebook and Instagram. These are the platforms that I interact the most. I interact a fair amount on LinkedIn but that is restricted to professional contacts and former/current students. I treat my students like the industry professionals I am hopefully training them to be, so I don’t find that I need to sensor what I post here.
Facebook and Instagram are a different story. I’ll start with Instagram because that is the smaller of the two networks. I have about 45 followers and until recently they had all been family or people I knew from high school or junior college. I have been fairly selective about who I’ve added. Those groups I treat fairly the same. I post mostly stories with pictures of food, or something cool that I made. I also tend to post vacation photos or pictures of whatever event I am attending (ie., concerts, fairs, etc.). Recently I added a few people from my CrossFit gym, and I find that I take a second longer thinking about whether or not I’ll post the vacation picture or maybe post a picture that I am not in. Sometimes I am a little more remiss to tag where I am or let them know about all my hobbies. That being said, I also now post more workout pictures/reels. I am now more likely to post a video of PR (personal record) lift than I was before. This also is now introducing the gym part of my life to my high school friends. Not to mention I tend to re-post to Facebook from Instagram. I recently had a friend message me on Facebook stunned that I had gotten into weightlifting.
My Facebook network is even more diverse. It’s mostly friends from school, elementary through graduate school. Of course, I have family members as well. In the minority are a few former students from when I taught in Belize and few former coworkers. It’s still not a very large network of 270 people, but that is large for me. I have a lot more distant cousins on there, so I have highly aware of what I post to Facebook. I don’t post a lot of opinions and keep it mostly to pop culture references when I do post. My timeline is often song lyrics, so they always know what I’m listening to or what song is stuck in my head. It share about sports that I am interested in or the occasional family photo. As my network grew to include the diverse group that it does, I unconsciously started to post less and less personal information or thoughts. In general, I started to make less posts to the point where I am today. I post mostly stories.