A friend of mine, Jean Baptiste, is about to step into a career sabbatical and go earn himself an MSc in Digital Anthropology. I love the way Anthropology is moving with the times, has gone “all digital”. Could make for some damnably interesting stuff; good on JB, I wish him truly well.
JB read my last post on Digital Brands.
“We use our digital brands to help express who we are. They allow us to be, to hold a mirror up to ourselves, and it is clear. We like what we see.”
Source: Yours Digitally: The Birth of Brand Charisma
JB made the observation we so “like what we see” because it’s narcissism of the contrived kind, a self-manufactured pixelated reflection of the cooler, better-looking, more impressive version of ourselves.
“Yours digitally” is a pretty positive post. And every upside invariably has a downside, every upbeat a corresponding downbeat. To even things up, JB’s comments got me speculating on the downbeat.
For “Social Innocence”, I mean this. Innocent, as in to happily portray yourself for who you are, and to live genuinely In-the-Moment - as opposed to at a remove, self-conscious to whether and when a moment can be tweeted or uploaded.
Social Media is turning private lives into public “factions”. (This theme has got me tinkering with some new descriptors.)
The criticism is we’re developing a “curators conceit”, living so much posthumously, “Life Experiences” only made “real” once they’re logged, tagged, uploaded, shared.
The Moment is no longer reflective of what occurred, because it only serves as “material”, as “Exhibited Proof” of the Socially Rich & Rewarding lives we’re clearly leading. The puzzler then becomes: Are we only enjoying the fun once someone else can see how much fun we had?
For, “The man who wasn't there”, we now have, “The life that wasn’t really lived”. Like being the camera-man at somebody’s wedding, the experience is through a lens, within a frame, “outside-the-moment”.
For a while now, an old school friend of mine has appeared to be “living through Facebook”. He was always a bit of a Walter Mitty-type, inclined to flights of fancy and exaggeration. All judgements aside, Social Media has become a Quite Major Channel for him, as the self-appointed “biographer” of his own digitally documented life. Fulfilling as it may be, I can’t help wonder, for just how long is he Out-of-Body, in the Third Person, applying an Observers Eye upon himself?
As Peggy Orenstein put it in “I Tweet, Therefore I Am”, for us all, there’s becoming a quite extreme blurring of “the line between person and persona”.
Few of us are so evolved as to be fully accepting of who we really are. “Being selective” is too big a temptation for almost everybody – but Social Media allows us to busily build the Avatar of Our Ego.
Online, the short and the fat can walk taller and feel thinner. Online, we can be All Ego, can be our walking Dorian Gray’s.
Most extreme perhaps, Social Media allows us to even have “Followers”, which is ego-fuelling on a wholly higher level. Is a Messiah-complex now within easy reach of everyone?
No question, Social Media taps deep into the human condition. All the upsides and downsides aside, let us ultimately hope it will bring out not only the best but also “the real” in us.
SP.
Comments