Digital Citizenship

Here are the three things that are most relevant to me in the digital community.

Respect: I relate with respect because in the digital community many people to seem to not respect others as much because there is a computer screen between them. The one negative thing about the facebook groups I'm in is there can be a lot of negativity and disrespect. When one person doesn't agree with an others view they tend to be rude and not so respectful of ones method. With the amount of disrespect that comes from these groups sometimes it's hard to not want to be apart of them. For example, my small dog is a German Shepherd mix so I was in this German Shepherd group on facebook. One day there was this picture game going around where you upload a picture of something representing your dogs name and see if people could guess it right. This was the first time I ever posted in the group and my post and all the others got deleted from the admin of the group. I was then upset and didn't understand why it got deleted and other people were too and starting asking questions on the page. That is when other people of the group started talking about how the game was starting to annoy them because of the amount of people playing and it needed to be done with. This then turned into a fight between people having fun playing the game and people being annoyed by the game. Because of all of this disrespect I ended up leaving this group because I don't believe in that kind of negativity over something bringing people together. I believe everyone deserves respect no matter what game is being played whether it be online or in person. You should always respect one another, treat people how you want to be treated.

Listen: When I am apart of the digital community I like to listen and learn. I am apart of many dog group forums on facebook about dog training. The reason why I like  to be on the groups is to listen how other people may go about training. Everyone has a different method that may work for a particular dog but won't work for another dog. I have actually been  able to learn a few things from these groups on training my own dogs and working with a pack of dogs. I believe that sometimes you have to listen to other peoples stories and theories to be able to learn about something no matter what it may be.

Research: I use the internet for a lot of research. My boyfriend and I have been thinking about getting a purebred dog in the future so we have agreed on starting to do our research on which breed may be the best fit for us and our lifestyle. The internet has many different kinds of resources for research. For instance, there is the akc.org website that has many links for breeders and informational facts, such as the energy level and grooming requirements of a breed. It can be very important to do your research before jumping into anything with knowing something about it.