Guest Speaker: Cassie Marie Edwards

Cassie Marie Edwards, an artist and master of her own social media image, came to our class and spoke on how she uses the internet to promote her work. She talked about her blog, her Facebook  her website, and her twitter all in great detail.

I came away from the talk thinking more about the image I have out there on the world wide web.  My Facebook privacy is tight, but for people who are my friends everything is fair game. Those embarrassing pictures from high school? Yeah they’ve got their own album, named for a terrible song lyric. My 4500 tweets are all open to public eye as well. I use a username, but that name is so commonly used with my actual name that it wouldn’t take much snooping to find that Glitchy and Alissa are one in the same.  Maybe its time to do some virtual laundry; delete the tweets, hide the pictures. I don’t like deleting old things. To me it feels like I’m trying to bury a part of who I was. But I think what needs to be done now is more about making sure what is currently viewable on my internet pages accurately represents who I am as a person and who I will later be as a professional.

I’m also toying with setting up a personal blog again as a result of this talk. I like to write. I’d love to be doing something later in life involving writing, even if it is for personal gain and not for profit. But finding a opportunity won’t be easy if I’ve got no references of my writing out there. I’ve already missed out on one unpaid writing position as a result of my lack of prepared writing samples and I think keeping a personal blog will help keep that from happening again. Plus it’d be nice to have an outlet for some of the weird thoughts on my mind sometimes.