I was in our Bristol office for an in-person workshop. I was attending a community manager training understanding behaviours workshop in Bristol. The workshop was led by Dave White. The focus was on digital practice and involved looking at visitors and residents and mapping your online activities.
I have done this workshop before quite a few times, and have even delivered a version of it as part of the Digital Leaders Programme and at the ALT Conference. So it was very familiar territory for me.
Despite having participated before in these kinds of workshops, I still threw myself into the process.
It was interesting to map my internet activity, as my online behaviours have changed quite a bit over the last few years (and even over the last few months).
One of the interesting observations as I reflect on the map, is what is missing. I use Google to search everyday, and I think that has become so normalised in my behaviour that I didn’t even consider putting it in. Having said that I am using search in Google Maps a lot more these days and that is something I didn’t use to to (and it is on the map).
I also reflected that Wikipedia is not there either, and this is a site I use on a regular basis for both finding out stuff and checking information, but I also use it to read about stuff that I find interesting, sometimes going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole of articles.
WordPress, a tool I use all the time for blogging was also missing in action.
On previous maps I did, Twitter was huge bubble or square on the map, today X is over on the left side of the map. Whereas before I would consider my behaviour to be resident in Twitter, these days it is a place I visit rarely and stopped engaging with the site last month. My replacements of Bluesky and Threads are there, but from a personal social perspective Facebook has become more dominant.
After using Flickr album at ALT-C in September, I have been thinking about re-engaging with the service and paying the subscription. ALT-C was also where Discord became my conference tool of choice, I think though that my use of that will decline over the next few months.
Another service, which I use to use a lot, Google Docs, is now a much smaller part of my digital footprint. I certainly don’t use it like I did a few years ago. Maybe that is the nature of the work I am doing, but I think also the use of Office 365 at work has changed how I collaborate on shared documents.
The work stuff is there, Outlook, Teams, (what was Yammer) and Dovetail. Though I personally use JIRA and Confluence, the rest of the people I work with don’t. I think what is interesting for me is how Outlook is a place I visit, but don’t necessarily use as a key communication or engagement tool, that’s where Teams comes into play.
Overall I did enjoy doing the mapping exercise and then reflecting on my practice.
