The different ways to express ourselves, often times have people wondering what the real us is like? or which of our personas is the real us?
I got the opportunity to interview one of my close friends. Her name is Stephanie Goris. She’s currently in the Real Estate business and agrees that through social media, she has been able to advance her career and express herself in many ways. Here are her ansers:
1. As per social media platform and apps, I am currently using Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. In the past I have used Myspace and Twitter.
2. I use my real name for all my accounts and have never used a fake alias. However, I only use my first name for all my accounts (excluding Facebook because it’s required)
3. I definitely have constructed different personas through my social media platforms mainly due to the audience or “friends/followers” i have. For my Facebook, I constructed a more conservative persona since I have all of my family and co-workers as ‘friends’ on the site. I am most careful of what I share since I want to hold a professional persona. However, on Instagram I have more friends from high school so I will portray a glamorous persona; in that I only post happy and upbeat post to portray a happy lifestyle. While on Snapchat, I only have friends whom I see and interact with outside of social media so I tend to post more day to day personas and it is the most reflective of my daily life. Also, since Snapchat does not hold a digital trail which people can search for like on Facebook and Instagram, I am more keen to post things I wouldn’t post on other sites.
This relates to different aspects of life experiences because I will post different experiences depending on the social media platform. For example, if I recently accomplished something at work or had a family event, I will post it on Facebook. If I had a fun night out I will post it on Instagram. If it was something little that happen during the day or if I was bored, I will post it on Snapchat.
4. In my opinion, I feel like the digital personas I constructed does help me cope with problems of privacy. Due to my audience on different social media platforms, it gives me the liberty to to pick and choose who sees my post. On the contrary, it does create new problems because it’s creating different digital personas of the same person (me) and can limit potential interactions with different friends/followers I have. It also portrays a different persona depending on the site which can cause internal conflictions of categorizing or judging my own life experiences to fit the persona I created depending on the platform.
As my friend Stephanie has stated, it’s become easier for everyone to potray a different persona in each of these social media. The driven concept that we are able to express different ideas, thoughts and images in different sites, while not one of them portraying the same persona is fantastic. This is similar to Turkle’s reading and one of the MUDs’ user experience. As he states that “gives people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their identity and to try out new ones”. Fortunately for us it hasnt stopped there. Now that we are able to express ourselves in many different ways, technology also gives us the opportunity to experience things in many different ways from on simple source.
In chapter 5, we discovered the world of virtual reality and role-playing games. Technology has “has led to the creation of large-scale virtual worlds where millions of players interact with each other through conventional mouse, keyboard and voice interfaces. Many of these games also allow for the wide-ranging personalization of the game environment in response to the commands of game players.” I myself have witenessed how powerful internet based games have become. I have younger cousins who are in love with the game of basketball, well not the real one the virtual one 2K and they spent most of their time playing and connecting with other players from home. So that, it has become a community of competition and fun, and although in this games he might seem like a really good player, in life he’s not.
1.From your own personal experience, do yout hink the way you potray your personas through social media has helped you build a virtual community?
2.Do you think we will ever just become virtual beings?
I agree with you and Turk that it definitely gives us a chance to explore versions of ourselves that we wouldn’t explore in “real life.” I think that some forms of social media have definitely form a virtual community: Reddit is one of them. Though it’s more of a forum and not actually social media, we are able to communicate and debate in a way that I imagine past chatrooms have worked – without knowing who the other people are. However, I don’t think we’ll just be virtual beings. We put too much of ourselves into our work. That’s why we’re considered the “me generation.”
Your friend sounds like my friend who I wrote a blogpost about too. I do enjoy that you use the term persona, like I did. Your friend also resembles my friend because she too uses personas to identify herself to others, make her inside jokes to those who are aware of this character/other identity, getting her privacy and also be able to be happy with it. So having a persona does help not only virtually but helped her real life networks. But honestly, we would become virtual beings if we don’t find balance with ourselves in real life, because that kind of escape is very tempting, especially with coping with harsh realities.
P.S I love The Real Slim Shady reference. I listened to that song yesterday with my same friend who I wrote about in my blogpost.