WP3: Insert Username Here: Presentation, Identity, and Expression Online
If you could be someone different, who would you be? No matter who you are, you’ve probably had an impulse to experiment with your identity. The easiest way to do this, in my opinion, is by lying online.
When you make a new account online, you have to choose a username for other users to know you by. More than likely, the name on your birth certificate isn’t available. Instead, you’re forced to think of a different name for yourself, to stretch your mind to see what else you want to be identified by. Or, you know, you could take the easy way out and enter your name with a string of numbers and underscores at the end. I’ve seen plenty of accounts along the lines of @Katie12345.
Either way, it’s kind of incredible that we inadvertently made a more flexible way to experiment with your identity. You can change your name or look without your grandparents commenting on your newly dyed hair at the dinner table. Instead, you can just press a few buttons and your profile picture is something completely different and no one bats an eye. The Internet has set almost an entirely new precedent for your presentation.
We, as users, have full control over every aspect of our identity when creating an account online. I want to fully explore this power every Internet user has. How does it affect the way people perceive themselves and others? I mean, why would we ever want to change something as essential as our identities? What would drive us to do that?
Personally, I enter this topic in the headspace of an artist. As an artist online, you primarily post your art with the expectation that other people will see it. However, contrary to real life, your art is the first thing people see when they stumble upon your account rather than your face or your full name. Thus, many artists create their own character or avatar that stands in as themself.
These avatars, personas, or ‘sonas’ as they’re more commonly known, bridge the gap between a user and the people they interact with. A sona’s appearance is entirely up to the creator to mold based on their needs as an online user. For example, I’ve personally seen a lot of artists drawing their sonas as a cooler, idealized version of themselves.
Imagine yourself, but with a suave attitude, sunglasses, pink hair and an outfit you would never feel comfortable wearing out in public. Or maybe you love cats, so you choose to represent yourself as an orange tabby. Or all of the above!
What’s so great about sonas is that there’s no limit on what the character design can be. It’s incredible what people can come up with when they can draw themselves as anything they can or want.
When you can be whoever you want in this online space, you can explore different sides of your identity, reveal things about yourself that you have to keep concealed in the real world.
I’ve experienced this phenomenon when playing Dungeons and Dragons. In the game, you create a character that you can roleplay as for an extended period of time. In one of my posts, I discussed how the chance to roleplay as a woman helped my sister come out as trans. By playing the part of her fictional character, she opened up a part of herself, just like a sona has the power to do.
Her fictional character, though she was a magic wielding half-elf, planted a seed in her mind. The opportunity to play a character with a different gender or life was freeing and eye opening, not just to her, but also to our friends we were playing with. Seeing her as a woman, or at least playing the part of a woman, helped them accept her as transgender once she came out. She used her persona as a way to explore her identity in a way she could never do just by herself.
While the usage of a persona can be really useful to some, it can also be damaging to others. Some people instead use the Internet as an excuse to avoid presentation at all. Many people’s online persona exists solely as their profile picture to avoid the subject altogether.
In fact, there’s a whole genre of content creators who never show their face. While artists are never expected to have their face plastered over their account, creators who stream or make videos are held to a different expectation.
These types of content creators present themselves without any image or allusion of their real appearance online. For example, if a user streamed on Twitch, but had an image of a sona to represent themselves instead of a live camera, they would be considered “faceless”. It’s a completely different set of vocabulary and expectations from the artists I discussed earlier.
Facelessness is a trait I’ve observed more and more people wanting to take on. Whether it’s because of a need for privacy, riding the wave of a trend, or a fear of presentation, I’m not sure.
A big aspect of facelessness is how there’s a level of hype for a “face reveal” sooner or later for a faceless creator. The term is thrown around carelessly with little to no regard for why someone would want to be faceless in the first place.
One of the biggest faceless creators of today, Corpse Husband, has been teasing his physical appearance to his fans for years, despite his vocal intention to never show his face due to psychological and physical restraints.
However, he posted an image of his real life hand as to hype up his audience, to the pleasure and excitement of his crazed fanbase. Even just a hand, to them, is enough to make fancams and a fuss over.
He also has a persona, but one that’s imagined by his fanbase. His popularity took away the opportunity for him to develop one himself, and instead gave away that chance to his fanbase.
The obsession with appearance online is rampant. When you enter an online space, most of the time it’ll be immediately without a face cam or “face reveal” unless you’re finding people on a dating site or Omegle. You can post on Twitter and type on Discord freely without any indication of what you look like, so why would anyone want to hype up something so normal?
There is a clear distinction between your “irl”, or in real life, self and your persona. Even when you aren’t a big shot content creator, the pressure for disclosure of your “real self” is overwhelming. A persona is simply not enough for other users sometimes. To them, there’s no supplement for the real deal.
Given this context, it makes more sense to me why someone would want to make their online persona as idealized as possible, outside of their own, personal motivations. The Internet has set up certain expectations for every user. If people are constantly interested and obsessed with your personal history and information, it’s only human nature to want to look as desirable or ideal as possible.
Teo Keipi studied this exact trend in Internet culture, looking into the connection between self esteem and identity online. He explains how any given Internet user has “full control over whether it is accurate or idealized to artificially enhance one’s appeal in the online arena (Anderson, Fagan, Woodnutt, & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2012).” (Keipi et al. 720)
Keipi’s usage of the term “appeal” links directly back to this need for desirability. You must appeal to the people you’re interacting with for a good online experience.
The connection people so desperately crave online is sated when they see an image that appeals to them in the little bubble next to a name. Whether that be a popular anime boy from Fire Emblem, a sun kissed babe with her tits out on Tinder or a familiar pride flag, people flock together with one look at a profile.
This entire dichotomy of how online sonas, avatars or profile pictures identify you really hinges on the principle of how you see yourself versus how others perceive you. The way you choose to present yourself online is dependent on both of these factors, whether it’s intentional or not.
Using a study by Melissa A. Click about male Twilight fans, we can see exactly how something as simple as an image could shift how someone could see you.
When you consider Twilight, the vampire/werewolf romance franchize, you think the people who would be interested in it would be primarily pubescent teenage girls. Click, however, observes Twilight’s male audience and their connection to such a “feminine text”, as she describes it.
Now, if you saw a user online with Twilight related posts littering their feed and an Edward profile picture, despite the fact that Edward is a man, you would recognize this account as a fangirl or “Twi-hard”. But a girl specifically. How is it that their icon was a man, but the immediate assumption is that they’re female? Additionally, people assume things beyond gender, as one of the male Twilight fans surveyed by Clicks findings said, “people think that I might be gay just because I like Twilight.” (Click 229)
Even with the Internet’s obsession with appearance, there’s so many loopholes and exceptions it’s hard to keep up. If the owner of this account revealed himself to be a male fan, he would likely be the victim of harassment or excommunication from the fandom or space.
His version of a persona could potentially help him integrate himself into the Twilight community, obscuring parts of his true identity while displaying others on his profile. The Internet could give him a chance to pick and choose which aspects of himself are most apt to express given the situation.
This type of behavior, splitting yourself between several different identities, is seen heavily in LGBT users online. For them, there’s a gaping issue of disclosure with people they know in real life, a.k.a. people who could potentially out them. It’s a fine line between expressing a gender identity they feel most comfortable with on their fanpage and getting kicked out of the house because of it.
The remedy a lot of these users have developed is spreading their identity across platforms depending on what is most apt for the social situation. They have multiple personas for multiple social situations.
David Gudelunas studied this behavior of gay men in his paper There’s an App for that: The Uses and Gratifications of Online Social Networks for Gay Men. He found that “they often juggled multiple identities across platforms. For example, they may be completely out and visible on a dating site, but choose to keep their sexual identity off of Facebook.” (Fox and Warber 81) It keeps their identity hidden when it’s comfortable or necessary, but out and proud in the situation in which they want to interact with potential partners.
The difficulty of gender and sexuality performance online plagues LGBT users in other situations as well. The usage of a persona gets more complex once you consider the stakes involved in presenting a different side of yourself as a gay or trans person.
When trans people present online, oftentimes they have to overcompensate their gender identity to ensure the fact that they won’t get misgendered. Then, if they go too far, they’re judged as trying too hard. I wrote more on this in my post about ContraPoints, a trans woman who is often criticized for her gender presentation as looking like drag.
Her outfits and makeup are, to her, adjacent to drag. It’s not as simple as equating heavy makeup as pretending to be a woman. Her gender expression is her persona, even though she is a woman on and offline. There’s a nuance to it that frustrates people.
People who look at your profile want to know what you are. Kwame Anthony Appiah writes about a similar experience in his The Lies that Bind. No matter where he goes, people somehow need to know “what are you?” (Appiah xi) with one look of his dark skin and posh accent.
Online, however, YOU have the chance to decide you are. You have more control over what people see than you’d think. ContraPoints takes full advantage of this, and no one realizes it.
I try to do the same. I use a different name online. Chris, I chose, would be a good fit for me. It’s not traditionally feminine, I can use it with any possible pronouns and most importantly, it’s different from my legal name.
I think part of what makes the name Chris so appealing to me is the fact that people wouldn’t know immediately what I am. The moment of confusion and deliberation of what pronouns to use for me is affirming for some reason.
For Contra, on the other hand, her “sona” online has an outrageously femme presention so the viewer is accutely aware of her feminitiy, but also that she’s a performer. The fact that her makeup and costuming is so detailed and glamorous silently communicates her purpose on her youtube channel as a “female female impersonator.” (Wynn) It’s confusing, just the way she likes it.
The reason I, and possibly Contra also, love to twist this expectation of identity is catharsis. I, personally, love the way I can so dramatically change my presentation online. The choice is there, so why not take the golden opportunity of the online space to experiment and mess around with my name and gender?
I like to think of my persona online as my version of Hannah Montana: a double life between Lucy and Chris. I can express myself more comfortably through the vessel of Chris, while irl, I keep myself more concealed. Even on Instagram I tend to use the name Lucy, as a lot of my family and friends from school follow me on the latter, so it feels less complicated keeping the two lives separate.
We can use this idea of a persona and bring it into the real world with us. We already use the Internet as a way to create another self already, so why not create one irl as well?
Have you ever told the barista at Starbucks your name was something else? It has no bearing on your life or relationships, and the only purpose is to see how it feels to be called by another name. It’s a real life persona, in action. A lot of people already do this through art, theater, or even Dungeons and Dragons as I explained earlier. It can be so enriching to explore yourself through other identities or worlds.
Ultimately, I think that the usage of personas has had a net benefit. Some may argue that it’s dangerous to mask your real self, that it’s misleading and predatory, but when used responsibly, for yourself, it can become an extension of yourself, not a costume that you put on to trick others.
So next time you make an account online, think about it. How are you going to present yourself?
Sources:
Appiah, Anthony. The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018.
Click, Melissa A., et al. “Twi-Dudes and Twi-Guys: How Twilight’s Male Fans Interpret and Engage with a Feminized Text.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 19, no. 3, 2016, pp. 219–239.
Fox, Jesse, and Katie M. Warber. “Queer Identity Management and Political Self-Expression on Social Networking Sites: A Co-Cultural Approach to the Spiral of Silence.” Journal of Communication, vol. 65, no. 1, Wiley Subscription Services, Inc, 2015, pp. 79–100.
Greenberg, Lucy. “POST 4: Playing Pretend in Your Own Skin”. 27 March 2022. Writ 150, University of Southern California, Article.
Greenberg, Lucy. “WP1: The Slippery Slope from Ponies to Predators”. 13 Feb 2022. Writ 150, University of Southern California, Essay.
Keipi, Teo, Oksanen, Atte, and Räsänen, Pekka. “Who prefers anonymous self-expression online? A survey-based study of Finns aged 15–30 years.” Information, Communication & Society, vol. 18, no. 6, 2015, pp. 717–732.
