Confronting your Online Identity
Over the past year or so, I have started to feel very disillusioned by social media, especially Instagram. In my younger days, I remember being excited to get home from school to continue talking to my friends. Not until 2013 did I sign up for Instagram with the excitement to be connected with others in a unique way. I was only 12, yet I didn’t see the harm in downloading the app. Now, after 8 years, the mental destruction is more visible than ever before to me. Instagram shapes the way I see others, and in turn, the way I view myself. My unhealthy attachment to Instagram is now doing me more harm than good.
The same kind of social engineering on Facebook is at work on Instagram. Jaron Lanier’s Channel 4 interview has made me think about the manipulation caused by society and the addictive schemes caused by the founders of Facebook themselves. Lanier mentions how our character is being damaged by social media addiction. The only alternative is to get rid of the manipulation machine that is secretly running in the background. However, Facebook doesn’t have the same effect that Instagram does on me and it has slowly become one of my most toxic social media apps.
Everyone in my generation seems to be present on Instagram somehow, and deleting the app will force me to suffer from the awful FOMO. Adults spend time in digital environments for many of the same reasons that children do: to interact with friends and other fascinating individuals and because these interactions are important for continuous self-development (Chako, M, 2018).
Our social lives are defined as “living in tandem with others, in relationships, in families, and in communities.” Sociality refers to people’s desire to make relationships and ties with one another and to experience life alongside others. A vast amount of forming connections can be done by socialising online. The use of digital technology has had an overall good influence on sociality by allowing more and more individuals to create and maintain social relationships and make physical plans.
Given the human yearning for connection and technology’s potential to function as an interpersonal mediator, it seems natural that people would turn to technology to bring them together so they may experience sociality even when they are separated by place and time.
The internet and digital media may play a significant role in socialising and self-development. This process occurs when we engage with others. People engage in techno-socialisation when interacting with individuals they know online, in person, or in both. Interaction with others shapes and transforms one’s self and identity. Much of what we learn about the world and how people work within it is absorbed into our identities. Our features and characteristics — physical, psychological, and emotional — develop and evolve with time. This is a continual process that will go till the day we die.
Individuals use those in their immediate vicinity as a kind of mirror to the self. George Herbert Mead has theorised self and identity. People experiment with various attitudes, behaviours, and even physical items (like clothes) of other people. Through interacting with others online, individuals begin to learn how they are perceived by others. “Others on the internet constitute a distinct ‘looking glass’ that produces a ‘digital self,’” explains sociologist Shanyang Zhao (2005). This self, Zhao has found, can differ from the identity one puts forth offline, especially for teenagers who are actively shaping their identities. For all of us, though, identity develops and shifts and changes over time.
I have been constructing another self, a virtual and public self, through social media. Even now, I often feel as though I am on a stage performing to my followers. But then I think every person on social media in some capacity is subject to their own illusion, to the toxic attitude of comparing oneself to another.
I wonder what would happen if I were to delete social media. Would I feel less anxious, open my mind up to its own ideas, or regret my decision to no longer connect with so many people. Would I miss waking up in the morning to launch myself into my social world by connecting effortlessly with the lives of others?
This blog is a project for Study Unit DGA3008, University of Malta.
References
- Chako, M. (2018). Super Connected. The Internet, Digital Media and Techno-Social Life.
- Zhao, S. (1735–1754). Beyond the self: Intersubjectivity and the social semiotic interpretation of the selfie. New Media Soc. 2017.
