Micro Project 6 : Super Participation

This micro project required for us to attempt posting our lives online as much as possible for a 24 hour window in order to create a form of digital identity.

Thoughts

Personally I felt that this project was really difficult as it just wasn’t in my personality to post everything I do online. A lot of the times by the time I remember that I have to post something online, the moment is already gone, and I have to scramble to find something or anything left of that moment to post online. This, while it does sound like a shortcoming in the completion of this project, has actually led to some interesting insights I have had about this project.

Between myself and Joseph

Joseph and I are on the two opposite ends when it came to this project; no matter what happened, he was always on the ball of his feet when it came to posting things online. When he was going to class, he’d post an update along with a selfie attached. When he reaches class, he also takes a picture with his classmates and of course, posts it online with a catchy caption. 

It comes naturally to someone like Joseph to share everything he does online (and it is no wonder he has so many Instagram followers), and while this is no shortcoming, it does reveal a very unsettling truth that probably anything and everything about Joseph can be found online.

Living in the 21st Century they say that there is nothing that cannot be found online; with the availability of personal data online to multinational corporations, there have been algorithms and patterns created in order to best determine a person’s personality and therefore the type of commercial products or commercials that they would be interested in. Along with the issue of data scandals such as Facebook’s scandal with Cambridge Analytica, the reveal of such information online could pose to be detrimental to us in the future.

My personal identity

It came to me that while I feel that my life was quite boring in that 24 hour window, I tried my best to make it look as interesting as possible. I thought to myself, why bother? Does it matter that much that my life was interesting? Is it so important to me that I have to portray my life as “happening”?

And the fact is that it does. Even though it isn’t in my nature to want to post any and everything possible under the sun, if I am going to post something I may as well make it interesting right?

This results in me ending up posting a persona of myself that is more interesting or more importantly, different from who I am. I don’t necessarily have the most interesting of friends who can all recite 100 digits of pi, but it just happens to be a unique talent of one of my friends. I don’t necessarily sit in excessively long transits home over the weekend pondering over what I’m going to do this weekend or where I’m headed in my life, yet I try my best to make myself appear sophisticated and thoughtful as a human being. The truth was, I probably slept half that transit away and got home only to sleep some more.

It is therefore true that my digital persona differs from reality. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.

For example, people look up body builders’ social media accounts to get a glimpse of what bodybuilders do or what they eat or what they bench. They look into these accounts mostly for this kind of information, because that is what the bodybuilder is known for doing. Quite hardly do you hear of people looking at body builders for the kind of pen they use or the kind of pet they have; this information is essentially redundant in a bodybuilders’ social media accounts. Sure, they create a form of intimacy between the audience and the bodybuilder himself by allowing the audience to understand that the bodybuilder has a normal life and has things that he does aside from bodybuilding, but it doesn’t take away the fact that the main reason these audiences or followers of the bodybuilder follow him is because he bodybuilds, and that they are interested in his bodybuilding. It doesn’t have to be how they can be like him, it can also be about how he takes pictures or how his pictures look good. At the end of the day, they’re interested in his bodybuilding and less of him as a whole person.

Creating an online digital persona of yourself could therefore allow yourself to be more marketable, because people know what to expect when they look you up. Instead of having to scroll past 10 posts of you falling asleep in bed or looking at the scenery you see, they get to see you benching or giving advice on bodybuilding or simply looking at the improvements you have made as a bodybuilder. And while this helps you and your cause, it makes a simple statement that an online and digital persona, while plausibly accurate, can also be easily falsified.

It thus teaches us as both posters and audiences of social media that we have to be careful of what we post and what we take in as information about someone else.

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