It’s well understood that our identity is defined by our social interactions. Carefully curating ourselves for different contexts is simply part of who we are. What social media appears to be doing is radically amplifying this behaviour in three important ways. First, it has vastly diversified the number and type of interactions. We are all multichannel people these days, communicating through a patois of speech, text, image, emoticon, approval and gesture, across a burgeoning array of platforms. Second, it has allowed us be much more ‘elective’ about the identity we share. Put simply, we can now have lots of identities that are relatively discrete and separate from each other; that behave differently and believe in different things. A mate on Facebook; a wit on Twitter; an auteur on Instagram; a Flaming Lamborghini on LinkedIn; a carnivore on Tinder. Third, it has given us an acute sense of audience. In ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’, Goffman describes identity as ‘performance’. And how. Like never before, we are aggressively projecting ourselves outwards to our “often imagined and constructed” audiences, self-consciously and diligently shaping our identity to the immediate social context of whichever channel we’re on.
We’re Not Lying — Medium
