Social Media and Double Consciousness
Social Media and Double Consciousness
W.E.B DuBois has the idea of double consciousness, the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
In other words, double consciousness is how you see yourself by others and how you see yourself by you. For example, the illustration above, the white mask she holds is how others see her and at the same time she sees herself with that the white mask on, but under the mask is only how she sees herself.
Everyone does this, everyone has a mask that they hold in front of their face to cover up their true selves. The masked used to cover the face though can be different. The mask could vary depending on the people you are going to engage. I will use myself as an example. I am tutor at a high school and there, I dress nice, speak politely to the students, and try to be the kindest person until the end of the school day. I put on this mask that I am always kind and that is all I let these students and others see, never do I show them a mask that has my personal life on it. At school, I talk to my friends who know a bit about me, more than my students and therefore I have this mask that resembles me a little more, but still is not me. The students that I talk to know more of me in the sense that I am working towards a biology major to work on becoming a vet, the classes I am taking, and parts of my personality that get along with their parts of personality. With my family and partner, they see me with the closest resembling mask than anyone because they know about me, they know who I am, they understand me, and because I could be myself with without needing to think about what I am going to say. That is a triple consciousness.
Social Media is helping people create a mask that does not resemble them, but they enjoy putting this mask on. With social media you can say so many things about yourself and some people will know that you could be lying, but not everyone especially to the small little things or maybe with even the big things. Anyone can go onto any social media and make up things about them selves to feel more interesting to others, they could make up a completely different life than what they live on these kinds of website and no one can say if they are lying or not. I just went on facebook and made this profile, where I graduated from M.I.T and i work at Sony as a technical designer. I would say that my actual profile is more like me, but there is probably stuff on there that is not true as well, although it is the profile that I used for myself. If I remembered correctly, on my “actual profile” it says I am from Okinawa, Japan. There are so many things that people can be guilty of that they lied about on social media, their age, profession, studies, and this all relates to double consciousness by showing that people can go to the point of lying to make them selves more amusing. There are some who even say things for pity, in order to get some sort of attention from the world, from all there “friends” on the social media. Social media is helping people make mask for them selves to hide, seem more interesting, or to seem more fun, but in the end, it is just a website.
Originally published at medium.com on January 20, 2016.
