Who am I?
by Su Baykal
Who am I? That’s a question I seem to be asking myself a lot lately and not in an existential, multi-dimensional, self-analytical way that this question seems to have been asked so many times in the past. I mean ‘Who am I?’ in the fleeting, impatient, no-answers-longer-than-5-words way, the way so many others have been asking this question, it seems.
The last time I asked this question I was staring at a yet un-posted picture of myself on Instagram, specifically the caption box. ‘What should I write?’ I asked myself. I couldn’t write just anything. I was tired, not in a good mood and had taken a selfie in my living room mirror. I typed:
What does it all mean anyway?
Why did I write that? Because that’s what best conveyed a combination of my current state of mind at that given moment and who I feel like I am inside. This same reasoning lies behind how I choose my last Facebook status, my last Snapchat and my last Tumblr re-blog. Looking at my screen, I think about how the real me can be best reproduced in the social media platform I happen to be looking at. It doesn’t really matter who exactly is looking at these posts, as long as they are ‘out there’ representing me. Most platforms have a way of making this sort of indirect communication possible. Facebook has the Timeline, Instagram has your Profile and Snapchat has Stories. These are all tools that help you maintain your online presence as a self-contained virtual individual, open to be viewed by whoever has chosen to add or follow you.
♂
It seems appropriate to call this type of virtual maintenance externalization. But there’s another side to this that is better called self-regulation. Our relationship with a post is not finished once posted. It is actually just starting, as it leads to a stream of comments, likes, views or…nothing at all. This is where the self-regulation comes in. Behavioral psychology is a branch of psychology arguing that our behavior can be controlled by reward and punishment. We do what we are rewarded for and don’t do what we are punished for. If comments, likes and views are rewards and no feedback is a punishment, then we as users react to what kind of feedback we get and regulate our online activity accordingly. Maybe that’s why seeing my Facebook posts from more than a year ago can be such an unsettling experience. I posted, I regulated, I changed.
So we self-realize, we self-regulate. I post a picture on Instagram, I get feedback, I post something else. Is that it? The idea of externalization and self-regulation assumes that the content we provide is only determined by us and other users. But what about the platform, the medium? The content we provide is influenced by where it is being provided to. We post things that can be consumed quickly, things that fit into Twitter’s 140 words, Snapchat’s 10 seconds and however much attention given to any one post on Facebook. We post things that are focused on us, a description of our morning, a song we’re listening to these days, a picture of our face. We learnt these rules at some point and we now accept and expect them from our platforms. They affect the answer to our question ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What should I write?’ when staring at the blank comment box.
When I think about externalization, self-regulation and the role that the platforms play in all of this, I ask myself another question that I’m not quite sure how to answer. How does the formation of our virtual identity affect us irl, in real life? Are the real me and virtual me separate entities? I would argue that they aren’t. Our acts of posting and re-posting, creating and recreating are not self-contained and must affect our real identities in some way. Maybe the other ‘Who am I?’, the more multi-dimensional, self-analytical one, is not that absent from the story after all. Maybe the other ‘Who am I?’ is indeed a good question to ask when it comes to us and our relationship with the social media we continually come back to.
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The essay was written by Su Baykal who was posting a selfie before getting psychological. She studies Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon.
Artworks by Stephen Booth.
Absurdist features profound & pointless writings on culture by new & odd luminaries. Submit your essays to getabsurdist@gmail.com.
