On Internet Personas
who r u?
As i’ve used the internet more the past few years and interacted with people online, i’ve come to understand internet personas more. Unlike real life, you get to choose everything about yourself online. The way you express yourself is fully in your hands, and if you so wish it can be completely disconnected from reality, unrelated to anything that identifies you (capital y?) in real life.
When you present yourself online to other people ,you choose every aspect that gets shown. Unlike real life, you have total control. If you were to meet me in real life, you would quickly know certain things about me. How I look, how I speak, the way I carry myself, my sense of fashion. I can control all of these to certain extents, but for the most part they are determined by factors outside of my control. On the internet everything is completely voluntary. You curate every single aspect of yourself in the online world, and as such, it may seem to be a more real representation of yourself than your actual self.
This is, and has always been, one of the most powerful draws to the digital world, as it gives an individual complete control over themselves, something they can never achieve of doing in their real life. However, this is where the ultimate contradiction lies that I find somewhat disturbing. The fact that one may come to the conclusion that the internet is the only for them to truly express themselves, that their true self lies online, that if an individual knows their physical form, then they will forever be unable to understand the individual in a way that is true to how the individual views themselves.
This ties into my thoughts regarding anonymity on the internet. If you meet a person online but learn facts about their real life self that do not match up with how they present themselves online, the illusion shatters and you no longer see them in the same light. The gulf between reality and digitality is infinite and the harsh truth of reality threatens break through the screen at any moment, if one is not careful. It is why Doxxing is seen as a digital death, as that gulf is closed in an instant as the real persona merges together with the digital one (though not of the doxxees own will). Are the people I interact with online real? If I met them in real life would they be the same? Obviously not, but I wonder how large the difference would be. Would I even be able to tell they are the same person? If all you know of a person is words they type down, tied to a profile picture and username, can you ever truly know them? Can you call them a friend? I don’t think you can. It is hard to think of them any different than robots, or some form of artificial life that only exists on the internet.
So which is the true self? Is the way I represent myself online more true to me than how I interact with people in real life? Does the anonymity of the internet allow me to engage in things that, if done in real life, might ostracize me from my peers or cause me to become (more of) a social outcast? I believe in some sense, yes. There are many aspects of myself that are only truly seen online through my interactions with others on the internet but also with the sort of media I partake in and willingly associate myself with. These sorts of things are not anything I discuss with people in real life because as I mentioned previously, I simply don’t have anyone to share it with. As time goes on, more and more of me is subsumed into what I do online, and I spend more and more time online. Are my social media accounts becoming better reflections of my inner self than my physical form? Is my real life persona simply a subdued form of how I act online? But if I do give up the internet, how will I find people with similar interests as me? How will I find new forms of art and media to partake in, discuss, and with whom shall I share my own creations? It is a digital dilemma that will continue to haunt me.