Social Media Authenticity and Identity

We care about our standing in our group, how others see us. We hide vulnerabilities to protect our status in our community. We especially don’t showcase vulnerabilities on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, because of the artificial size of the networks. Without our vulnerabilities, we don’t share our strengths and true selves tied to those vulnerabilities. We don’t see others’ vulnerabilities and may appreciate them less.

With fewer Friends on these social media — for instance, only those knowing us well enough to understand our unique vulnerabilities — we may feel more comfortable sharing authentic content. If social media didn’t broadcast everything in the News Feed, we also may feel more comfortable sharing authentic content. But with the News Feed and our large number of Friends we’re heavily exposed. So we may upload materialistic and superficial content, rather than authentic content, to reduce exposure and .

Any technological system has a culture created from those using the system, interacting with its design. Social media’s design does not encourage intimate authentic sharing but rather mass broadcasting and materialistic, celebrity, high-surveillance lives. The public Friend count makes us have more Friends to seem more popular, exposing us more. The News Feed broadcasts our activity to our Friends, exposing us and discouraging intimate, authentic interaction. The result is superficial. The exposure makes us monitor and curate our profiles, leading to more use and advertising revenue.

Our digital profiles are not false representations; we create them to project our material, physical, or social strengths. But we may hide our vulnerabilities, rarely sharing them on social media. The reason we curate and monitor our profiles to hide vulnerabilities is because Comments may let others exploit them and react negatively. Minimizing vulnerabilities is safer than revealing vulnerabilities and being exposed to pain from bullying.

Using and interacting with social media, in the process of curating a profile, requires us to experiment with our outward identity and think from the crowd’s perspective . We develop and refine limited narratives about who we are in the crowd with social media. We want a story in our selves, and there’s an argument that it may help with that. But using social media like Facebook promotes a limited narrative rather than an authentic one with vulnerabilities and thus strengths.

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