Understanding your digital self

We live out our online lives as many performances. As social media users, although we try and  operate as our authentic selves, these multiple identities that we create also change over time. We participate in forums that allow us to build public or semi-public profiles within a limiting system, determine a list of other users with whom we share a connection, and view and traverse those made by others.

While this process can often be disconcerting, it’s hard to choose not to engage in such a dynamic digital world. Experts in personal branding consistently emphasize that what we say and do online should be authentic. But we live rich, complex lives with varied interests and continuously evolving personalities—so how can a single digital identity fully represent us? Our digital identities are mostly formed by what we do on these networks: the words and images we use, the texts and videos we share and the opinions that we express.

These networks define us in the forum because they generate perceptions that directly affect our reputation. While self-presentation in the presence of multiple audiences has been linked to positive effects (e.g. Leonardi, 2014), some users find it difficult to meet the expectations of multiple audiences simultaneously. This is especially relevant for those that are more visible in the public eye, such as celebrities and influencers.

But what of those of us who live relatively ‘ordinary’ lives offline? We try, to the best of our abilities, to segregate different personas for distinct purposes and to address specific audiences. This is however, becoming increasingly difficult with the rapid advent of new social media platforms and the slow blending of our private and professional lives.

This further makes our attempts at separation difficult to sustain. This leakage can occur over time where older content was created and shared with a specific group in mind but is accessed at a later date by an unintended audience. On the other hand, content created for one platform or audience can be shared beyond the intended group. In regards to our professional lives, we usually also have to be careful about the ethos of the companies we work with and our personal views that might counterpoint that ethos. How do we then look at a healthy interaction between our various digital personas?

Social media for most of us is where we develop both self-presentation and self-disclosure skills in order to cultivate our personal autonomy. It is also a place where we experiment with our identities. The smartphone allows us to produce a narrative of our lives, to choose what to remember and what to leave out of our own stories. In “The Social Photo,” Nathan Jurgenson explains how, in a more worrisome sense, as more of life is experienced through camera screens, it seems to occur in a more distant, intangible manner, where the messiness of lived experience is made into something merely observable. According to Jurgenson, taking social photos changes the way vision works—a process that began with the advent of cameras and is continuously evolving. Our phones thus become mechanical eyes that help us interpret our experiences. 

Is it possible, then, to navigate digital spaces and perform our collective identities, without falling into the trap of distilling ourselves into a set of neatly organized facts?

Within these new frameworks, people now choose to alter their own social identities, change the ways others perceive them through carefully curated social media profiles, use social media tools to expand their own social (and in many ways, IRL) connections and have their real identities fully or partially concealed by virtual ones. All in all, through social media, we have a new, unprecedented freedom to construct our own identities. 

Interestingly, studies have found that the self-presentation methods we use to curate our online selves are highly linked to a feedback process that is amplified within such social platforms. Particularly when we engage in self-derogatory or self-enhancing practices, we could set off a cycle where we continually change our behavior and subsequent identities according to the responses these trigger on our social network. For example, when we receive a large number of ‘likes’ or ‘comments’ on certain posts as opposed to others, we could subconsciously register these trends and eventually try and curate our social media profiles to reflect these trends. Further, studies have shown that a major motivation for social media use is the ability for individuals to manage “the impression they make on others”, and through social media sites, users have the opportunity “to create, modify, or maintain an impression of themselves in the minds of others”. This does come with its own complications — for eg. studies by Kerrigan and Hart (2016) have illustrated how our older online selves may be seen as incompatible with new lifestyle or career developments, and as social media users, we have not yet developed tools and practices for dealing with our past selves. 

All in all, a huge responsibility falls on us, as social media users, to understand and critically introspect what happens to our perceptions of self and identity when we continuously internalize these curated versions of ourselves online. After all, when we show up as our authentic selves, we create the space for many others to do the same. 

References:

1. Leonardi, P. (2014). Social Media, Knowledge Sharing, and Innovation: Toward a Theory of Communication Visibility. Information Systems Research, 25(4), 796-816. doi: 10.1287/isre.2014.0536
2. Jurgenson, N. (2019). Social Photo. Verso Books.
3. Cipresso, P., Wiederhold, B., & Riva, G. The Psychology of Social Networking Vol. 1. Personal Experience in Online Communities. 4-14.
4. Ahadzadeh, A., Pahlevan Sharif, S., & Ong, F. (2017). Self-schema and self-discrepancy mediate the influence of Instagram usage on body image satisfaction among youth. Computers In Human Behavior, 68, 8-16. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2016.11.011
5. Kerrigan, F., & Hart, A. (2016). Theorising digital personhood: a dramaturgical approach. Journal Of Marketing Management, 32(17-18), 1701-1721. doi: 10.1080/0267257x.2016.1260630
6. Marwick, A., & boyd, d. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114-133. doi: 10.1177/1461444810365313