What is my online identity? Am I the person I portray myself to be on social media, or merely a fabrication? How much of my true self is being shared with others the internet? How many versions of me exist online? How has this idea of self evolved? Within this blog post, I’m going to examine my own online identity, and more specifically, I’m going to look at this identity across the different social media platforms that I use regularly.
My relationship with social media is in one word…rocky. I can still recall the day in 2011, where the year 8 version of myself is sitting there at the kitchen table, dumbfounded, looking at my laptop screen. ‘Creating a Facebook profile for a 14-year-old shouldn’t be this hard’, I thought to myself. I was wrong. I was up to the section where Facebook was asking me for my interests; the things I liked and the stuff I do. The difficulty wasn’t so much identifying the things that I liked, that was the easy part. No, the problem was to do with the sharing of this information. Why did I want to share this with people? What would people think of my interests? Should I say I’m interested in X or Y, because a lot of people also are interested in X or Y, even though I wasn’t interested in X or Y? After minutes of internal conflict, I finished setting up my Facebook profile, making sure I liked X and Y, and that people could see that. It would take me years (and in some ways, is still taking me years) to admit that I don’t like X and Y, and actually, I prefer Z.
Jeff Pooley (as cited in Smith and Watson, 2014), reaffirms my internal conflict with his point that “authenticity today is more accurately described as ‘calculated authenticity’—. . . stage management.” (p. 75). This quote is an accurate depiction of my thought process. I wanted to be myself, and in many ways, I was being myself and reflecting this online. However, I was very cautious about doing so. I wanted to make sure that the information I was sharing about myself was positive, and that people would like what they were reading. This general feeling of anxiety has followed me throughout my online journey right up until the present moment, however it is something that I am confidently and positively dealing with.
It is so easy for me to paint the version of myself that I want people to see. My words and images are the paint, and social media sites are the canvases I use. When I review my online presence, I’ve noticed that my persona tends to change based on what site I’m using. For example, on Twitter (which I am new to and slowly warming up to), my tweets, the people I follow, and my engagement tends to revolve around sports.
Through sports, something that I’m genuinely interested in and happy for people to know about, I’m more confident in sharing my thoughts and opinions.
On Instagram, I tend to focus more on my personal life. I tend to share images of myself with friends, family, pets and others I am close to, or of places I have been and enjoyed.
Here, I’m careful to share images of myself in a way that I believe to be positive, as I want people to enjoy the content that they’re seeing.
On Facebook, I am more likely to communicate with people via messaging and sharing funny content through the use of tagging. And then at work and at university, my online persona takes a more professional approach through formal language and interactions.
Four different social media platforms. Four different versions of myself. All so different to each other, however each one able to encapsulate a different part of myself. Like a jigsaw puzzle, they come together to create my own online identity. It’s nearly impossible to say whether or not the selective nature of social media is a positive or a negative. What is easy to conclude however, that is as long as social media sites continue to exist, millions of people will be able to control their online identities, and decide how they want the rest of the world to view them.
References
Smith, S and Watson, J 2014, ‘Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation’, in Poletti, A and Rak, J, Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, pp. 75
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