Social Media and Identity Formation
An interview with my mum about her thoughts on identity in the age of social media
How do you view your own identity? Would you say you know who you are?
I still don’t know who I am. I think as you go through life the main character stays the same… the basis of who you are stays the same. But you grow all the time… everyone and everything you meet adds to you or takes away from you. You are a product of your environment.
So you don’t think we’re born with our identities?
Your basic nature is there in the beginning. You might more prone to becoming really shy or confident… some people are lucky and they seem to be more capable of being confident.
The best or the worst can be brought out as a product of your environment and how you’re treated.
“We used to be in the centre of our own solar systems... now we orbit around social media; the sun which we cannot help but observe.”
How do you think social media affects people’s abilities to form and express their identities?
Social media forces decisions. You shouldn’t judge instantly, no-one should. It takes time to get to know a person and there is so much more to people than what an image can ever possibly show. But social media is all about spontaneous judgement on a superficial image and there’s so much of it, so many images it encourages judgement without thought.
These immediate reactions are based on calculated and superficial veneers of people with no depth.
I agree, although of course this looking at the cynical side of things…
Yes, yes… there are so many good things that social media has allowed! The ability to connect to anyone anywhere is amazing. But I think in terms of identity it is more harmful than helpful in a lot of ways.
In what other ways do you think that social media impacts people’s identities and their identity formations?
It feels like people are too willing to jump on bandwagons with very little substance or reasons why… it’s a heard mentality. It feels like a lot of people don’t necessarily look into the details of things - due to lack of time, effort, the amount of stuff on the internet etc - and they follow what other people are saying. Maybe they don’t realise they’re doing it… maybe I do it to a degree, we probably all do. But I try to make decisions that are informed and from independent thinking.
It’s sad that it seems uniqueness is disappearing… we are all becoming one. Privacy is becoming more of a luxury too. The worst part about social media, though, is the fact that we are uploading our lives instead of living them… we’re watching people do things that we want to do and have our phones out all the time in our culture.
Yes I think this is all true, of course to an extent…
…yes of course it’s not all like this. But it’s effecting the way people are living… people’s lives.
How has social media affected your view of yourself, your identity?
I was thinking about this the other day… I feel like before social media the way I viewed myself was at the centre of my own little universe. I don’t mean this in a self-centred way, despite how it sounds. I mean that I pictured myself standing with everything else orbiting around me and it was up to me whether I wanted to see it or not. It was up to me whether I wanted to be a part of it or not. But since facebook and instagram and this whole connectedness, I see myself as orbiting around the centre. And that centre is everything else in life. And I can’t help but see everything that’s going on, everything everyone else is doing. It makes you feel outside of life constantly trying to get in. It makes you feel like you’re on the exterior, an outsider, and observer trying to live your own life while witnessing everything else whether you want to or not. In the past it was never like that, you just didn’t think about what everyone else was doing all the time… out of sight out of mind, so you didn’t compare, you just lived your own life and that was that.
