"Who am I?": Identity in the Age of Social Media

When I was in seventh grade, I remember sitting at my desk in my English class with my textbook opened to the introductory page of our newest short story unit. The theme: Who am I? As a seventh grader, I pondered why that question served as the foundation for an entire literature unit. Isn't a person's identity simply linked to their physical characteristics, parentage/family history, job, and choice of friends? As I soon learned, the concept of one's identity is anything but simple, and even as an adult, after knowing myself for over thirty years, I still cannot formulate a succinct answer to this question.

Who am I? We spend our lifetime pondering this question, and the answer to this question evolves as our life progresses to each successive chapter. Are we truly the sum of all our parts, or are we the attributes of ourselves that we pick and choose for others to see? 

I have always been very intrigued about the idea of each person living in their own, unique version of reality; our perceptions of ourselves as well as of other people are all unique and based on our individual life experiences/interactions. In my reality, I see my "whole", unfiltered self: the good, bad, and ugly. Of course, like a vast majority of people, I try to minimize the amount of exposure of my "bad" or "ugly" sides to other people, but, inevitably, they emerge from time to time. In general, family and close friends tend to be more forgiving and understanding when one's "bad" or "ugly" side emerges, as family and close friends have had more time to get to know and enjoy one's "good" side; this is less so the case with strangers and acquaintances, who, with one bad experience and nothing else upon which to base a judgement of a person's character or identity, will form a negative opinion about a person when they see that person's "bad" or "ugly" side.

The beauty of human relationships lies in the fact that they are malleable: a simple action or experience with another person can drastically change one's opinion of that person and that person's identity in the eye of one, or several, people. A simple kind gesture can be the springboard of a friendship. A compliment can be the first step towards a romantic relationship. A consensual hug or handshake can lay the first bricks for the foundation of a community. Terse words can cause life-long rifts among family, friends, or romantic partners. Fumbling one's words in a speech can mar a person's identity in the eyes of the public. Throughout most of human history, once an action has taken place, it becomes a piece of the past, unable to be altered, and never to be replayed. A person could be forgiven for a cruel action over time, and the action itself would remain in the past...

...and then came the dawn of Smartphones and social media.

According to an article by Flores (2018), social media gives a lot more permanence to a person's careless or hurtful words and actions, as, if there is evidence of those words or actions posted to social media, even deleting the evidence will not permanently remove it, as other people have the ability to take screenshots, save media to their device, and reupload these screenshots and media to other places on the Internet. Imagine having one of your worst moments recorded and uploaded to the Internet for a world-wide audience to see! Even years after the incident had passed, new audiences would watch the moment and make judgements about you and your character. This mistake would become a permanent part of your identity.

As an example of how one bad decision on social media can have a permanent impact on a person's reputation, Flores' (2018) article cites Roseanne Barr's 2018 Tweets that ultimately cost Roseanne her place on the reboot of her TV show and her reputation among many contacts in Hollywood and members of the general public. Although several years have passed since this incident took place, nobody is able to search for Roseanne's name in a public database without finding articles about this incident or images of the original Tweets. This Tweet now becomes part of Roseanne's digital footprint, and ultimately her online identity, that will follow her for life. 

Although social media can benefit our relationships with others by providing an online space in which people can establish and maintain connections with others that are "...similar to [the connections] obtained in offline relationships" (Grieve et. al, 2013, p. 608), it is important to remember that everything we post or write online - even if we are writing something in a "private" chat to somebody else or posting a picture to a supposedly-private account - permanently becomes part of our identity. It's also important to stress the importance of the digital footprint to the younger generation, living out their adolescent and college years via social media - and not always making the wisest choices about what to post. 

So who are we? Just as before, we appear to be the sum of our parts. In the offline world, we are still as complex and multifaceted as ever. However, in the age of Smartphones and social media, unfortunately, every digital "mistake" can be saved and thus permanently becomes part of our identity, which further emphasizes the need to think before you post and to the teach the younger generations to do the same.

References

Flores, T. (2018). How your social media defines you more than you think. Unwritten. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://www.readunwritten.com/2018/06/07/how-social-media-defines-you/

Grieve, R., Indian, M., Witteveen, K., Tolan, G. A., & Marrington, J. (2013). Face-to-face or Facebook: Can social connectedness be derived online? Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 604-609.

The Pandemic and Me: Changes in my Media Ecology

Hello, everybody! 

I am reviving my Edublog for my Instructional Computing course, so, if you are somehow still here from my blog's initial launch in 2010, prepare for weekly updates! 

In many ways, my experience of living through the COVID-19 lockdown starting in March 2020 was not unlike the experiences of most others: I had to quickly adapt to doing my job remotely, and my in-person social life abruptly ended for what seemed like an eternity. I would argue that I was definitely more socially isolated than most people: While most individuals live in a house with their family, I, a woman in my early 30s, lived in a townhouse with one roommate who rarely left her room and another roommate who spent her time during lockdown living with one of her relatives. Thus, I spent approximately the first two months of the lockdown entirely alone, with the absence of any in-person human interaction. 

There are a few facets of my life that are particularly unusual: Most people, by their 30s, if they have a significant other, reside with that person. My boyfriend and I have been dating for over eleven years, and, aside from our first seven months of dating, we have been a long-distance couple. In our time together, he has lived in three different states, and I have lived in two. There was a two-year period in which we were "only" a 2.5-hour driving distance apart, but even still, we were unable to see one another more than maybe twice a month. My parents and most of my close childhood friends live in my home state, from which I moved 500 miles away in 2015 in order to take my current job. Thus, going into the pandemic, I was already very used to using electronic platforms and innovations to maintain my closest relationships. The only difference was that now, not only did I have to use electronic innovations to maintain those relationships, but now, I had to maintain a long-distance relationship with every single person in my life - from my students to my co-workers and other casual acquaintances. Although our physical distances were, at most, just a few miles apart, these were functionally long-distance relationships in that I had no way of actually seeing these people in person and had to communicate with them using the same electronic innovations that I had previously reserved for my boyfriend and parents.

Since getting together with others in person was no longer an option, I, like many people stuck at home, went to social media as a means of connecting with people in the outside world. I had begun to notice that the very nature of social media posts began to shift as the months of the lockdown progressed. No more were people posting pictures of their extravagant vacations or status updates about some award won by their child; nobody's life was made to look grandiose or "perfect", as was often the case before the lockdown. The content of what I saw on social media during this time is very consistent with types of content witnessed by a variety of people interviewed in Rani Molla's (2021) recent article on Vox: [In social media postings during the early days of the COVID-lockdown], "...houses were a mess, children were home and misbehaved, people didn't wear makeup." No longer did any of us strive to depict our lives as "perfect," for we all shared a reality in which nothing was perfect. In fact, according to Molla's (2021) article, social media platforms that exposed the less "perfect" sides of our lives were the platforms that had the most growth during the pandemic (e.g.: TikTok). It makes sense, though: We were afraid of the future. Nobody knew how long we would have to stay inside; nobody knew whether this virus would wipe out our entire species, as a vaccine had not been developed; there was just so much uncertainty that we used social media as a platform to bond over our fears and the imperfections of our lives. We knew nobody was living their "best lives" (I am so sick of that phrase...), and any attempt to pretend that we were was met with scrutiny and disbelief.

I recently looked back at my own Facebook posts around that time. While I did not post frequently, I did use Facebook as a means of posting humorous content during the pandemic from time to time. As a middle school teacher at a school with a 1:1 iPad program, we had a pretty smooth transition to our eLearning model. My school actually had our eLearning up and running less than a week after school was called off. The first several weeks of our eLearning model was asynchronous: The teachers would unlock a new folder on Showbie (our learning management system at the time) daily that contained the students' work for the day. I made daily instructional videos for each grade level (sixth, seventh, and eighth), in which I tried to keep the spirit of my class alive through somewhat interactive games (I would hide a "Secret Word of the Day" within a piece of content that I made for class that day and would challenge the kids to find the "Secret Word of the Day" as they were going through their lessons) and activities (I once asked the eighth graders to illustrate what they believed an oven toaster would look like, and then I took the pictures and made them into a slideshow that introduced the next day's video). I would also occasionally dress up in humorous costumes for the videos just to catch everybody off guard (I once dressed up in the student uniform and asked the kids if they missed having to wear it every day. Then, for some reason I think was related to some kind of Virtual Spirit Week, I also dressed up in an elephant onesie and wore a pink cowboy hat.) Because my antics lifted my own spirits and the spirits of the students I taught, I would occasionally post about them on Facebook just to give my friends and personal community at large something to laugh about in those uncertain times. 

Molla's (2021) article states that during the pandemic, a lot of people "...abstained from posting [on social media] to not give the impression they were doing something they shouldn't be." This definitely described me, especially once the school year ended. In early June 2020, my thought process was that I was going to stay in my house all summer and just wait for the new school year to begin. I knew that the fall would bring many changes, include the start of my Ed.D. program, and I needed that summer to simply relax - a concept that is now very foreign to me. I was content with staying at home and reading books all day...until my boyfriend suggested that I spend a large portion of the summer with him.

Let me tell you: The pandemic was a blessing for long-distance couples (Although I don't know many long-distance couples, this was definitely the consensus among those I know!) My summer obligations had all been canceled. I had all the free time in the world. Why not go and actually spend time with my boyfriend, to see what it was like to be an actual "normal" couple that lives in the same state? He had just moved to yet another new state, into a townhouse that was larger than any of his previous dwellings, so there was now plenty of room for me and a month's worth of my belongings. I put on the biggest, most protective mask I could find, got on a train, and I was gone until August. I knew that I would face a lot of judgment from family members and friends for my decision to travel during that time - and my subsequent decisions to travel to his place again for Thanksgiving and Christmas later that year, since my parents did not think it was safe for me to travel home. This meant that, during my visits to see my boyfriend, I took a lot of pictures that I kept to myself (it was very hard to do at times; he lives in a place that is very scenic, and I was able to take some beautiful pictures of wildlife and landscapes that I would have loved to have shared with others on Facebook). Eventually, I did post some of those pictures, but I waited until the mid-2021 to do so, after the vaccine had come out, and I was very vague about when the pictures were taken. Like the people in Molla's (2021) article, I prefaced each post with a note about how I had followed "COVID-safe" protocols when I had travelled to avoid what I perceived as potential judgement from others.

In general, since the pandemic began, I have found that I am posting much less content about my life on social media. Quite frankly, it's nobody else's business what I am or am not doing, and I am noticing a downward trend in posts about the personal lives of others, unless it is an announcement of a major life event, like an engagement or the birth of a child. Now that we have more freedom to be out and about, most of us seem to be experiencing a bit of a social media "exhaustion" after using it as one of our primary sources of communication when we had to stay in our homes for such a long time. 

Although social media was derived as a way for people to keep in touch with one another, in the last several years, it has become a platform of bickering and the spread of misinformation. The pandemic itself has caused political divides and rifts within families and friend groups and social media has become a platform in which this bickering continues. As stated by Baym and boyd (2012), "...offline contexts permeate online activities, and online activities bleed endlessly back to reshape what happens online" (p. 327), so it does make sense that our offline interactions with others find a way to trickle into our online interactions with those people, and vice-versa. 

So where does this leave my media ecology in the present moment? Aside from posting on social media much less frequently than I had before the pandemic, I have resorted to using other platforms for staying in touch with my loved ones. I have utilized Zoom and Google Hangouts to frequently catch up with some of my friends from high school. In fact, I have been in touch with them more frequently in last couple of years than I have throughout most of our adult lives. I have also used Zoom and Google Hangouts to play Jackbox games (would highly recommend!) with my immediate family members, and we have created some shared memories and very strange inside jokes in the last couple of years because of these highly-entertaining games. We are using these digital tools to engage in genre of new media participation of "hanging out", as described by Ito et. al (2009), for we are unable to get together physically, but we spend time being together online (and occasionally, somebody will be multitasking, just like with today's youth!)

Unfortunately, the pandemic seems far from over. From the perspective of a person who is greatly interested in educational technology and society's shifts towards and away from social media, I am curious to see how our society's usage of social media sites and collective media ecology will continue to evolve over time.

References

Baym, N. K. & boyd, d. (2012). Socially mediated publicness: An introduction. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(3), 320-329. 

Ito, M., Sonja, B., Matteo, B., boyd, d., Cody, R., Herr, B., Horst, H. A., Lange, P.G., Mahendran, D., Martinez, K., Pascoe, C. J., Perkel, D., Robinson, L., Sims, C., & Tripp, L. (2009). Hanging out, messing around, geeking out: Living and learning with new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Molla, R. (2021, March 1). Posting less, posting more, and tired of it all: How the pandemic has changed social media. Vox. Retrieved January 16, 2022, from https://www.vox.com/recode/22295131/social-media-use-pandemic-covid-19-instagram-tiktok