Has your social media use turned into a bit of a black hole that seems to be sucking up all of your time? Or do you post any and everything from your personal life but haven’t quite had the chance to think about who is actually watching?
David Poglar has created a course on Skillshare that aims to make you more conscious of your social media usage and provide some concrete steps for improving your digital life. Let’s have a look to see if “How to live Online: 5 ways to shape your digital world” lives up to its promise.
Table of Contents
Who is David Poglar?
David Ryan Poglar is a pioneering tech enthusiast, 3-time TEDx talker, and tech writer who has appeared on CNN, CBS This Morning, New York Post, and several other outlets. He is a former attorney and a college professor who made the shift to trying to introduce thoughtful thinking in creating and implementing technology.
David founded All Tech Is Human, which advocates for better alignment of technology with its users, and also frequently hosts the Funny as Tech podcast.
Overview of the course
The course focuses on five ways that can help social media users operate safely in the digital space, making for an easy and chronological way to navigate the course. Poglar also provides some introductory notes and gives a brief summary of why it is important to be part of shaping the digital world, making for a total of eight lessons.
To help explain how he envisions our online interactions, Poglar uses the term “digital citizenship” which he defines as creating a healthy, balanced social media presence and being thoughtful of one’s interactions and their consequences. Introducing this term gives us a better framework to look at his five main points.
These five points are broken down as follows:
- Digital Health and Wellness: Technology impacts people’s lives to the extent that it can alter their physical health. This lesson introduces symptoms that are caused by the dominant existence of technology in human lives.
- Privacy and Cybersecurity: Looking at how best individuals can protect their privacy on social media, the lesson focuses in on the importance of activating 2-factor authentication.
- Communication and Etiquette: This lesson tries to encourage people to think of the ramifications of posting, commenting, or sharing any kind of content.
- Media Literacy: Technology has allowed everyone to be a content creator without necessarily considering the ethics of traditional content creators. The topic allows for self-introspection regarding misinformation in particular.
- Rights and Responsibilities: Individuals give up a lot of rights as part of the Terms and Services of social media platforms – that the vast majority do not even glance at. Apart from trying to address this issue, the lesson also looks at the laws that enable the sharing of copyrighted content and how content creators can protect their work.
How much does the course cost?
Courses on Skillshare can not be bought individually – they can only be accessed by signing up for a Skillshare membership. The good news? Skillshare offers e-student.org learners a full month free trial if you use our link (if not using our link, there is normally only a 7-day free trial). As virtually all Skillshare courses will take you less than a month to complete, you can in effect take this or any other Skillshare course for free – or any number of courses that you can finish in a month.
Once your free trial is over, the cost of Skillshare is $165 per year, which averages out to $13.75 per month. This gives you full access to all 34,000+ Skillshare courses. But if you're not happy to continue, you can easily cancel any time before your free trial ends – just go to your payment settings in your account.
If you have no need for a free trial, you can instead get %30 discount on your first year by using this special link instead. With this link, your first year will be just $115.50, averaging out to $9.63 per month. Note that this offer is only valid for new accounts, so it can't be combined with the 30-day free trial.
Concluding recommendations
As a social media user, I can completely agree that becoming a conscious and thoughtful user can help in the digital world. Social media is awash with bullying, body shaming, unrealistic beauty standards, and a range of other issues. If individual social media users can just take a step back to think about the impact of their comments or content, we could at least improve the situation – even if it is unlikely that we can fix the current situation in one fell swoop.
“How to Live Online: 5 ways to shape your digital world” is great for anyone who is looking to start exploring how they can become a better digital citizen. It allows for self-introspection and can help maintain a balance between digital and real lives. Moreover, it has some useful points for digital marketers, especially regarding media literacy and the responsibilities laws to better navigate the digital space.
