Virtual Identity

When I think about my ‘virtual identity’, I think about the person that others perceive me to be online. Not only that, but also the virtual identities of my online friends and followers. Personally, my virtual identity does not stray too far from who I am in the real world, simply because I rarely post things on social media. I use social media as a way to occasionally share my opinions about something I am passionate about, interact with friends, and share a few pictures. I will admit that as a younger teenager, I put a lot more emphasis on social media than I do now. I spent hours comparing myself to the pictures of other girls’ looks and lives, and even though I knew that it was not helping me in any way, I had a difficult time keeping myself from doing it. At that age most people naturally compare themselves to others, but social media makes it so much easier to do. Most teenagers nowadays don’t even realize how much social media has taken over their lives because they’ve grown up with technology, so it has become second nature for them to constantly be checking their Facebook feeds and Instagram likes. I didn’t enter into the social media scene until I was about 16, but now I see ten year olds with smartphones and Instagram accounts. I have friends who will spend hours checking out how many likes their latest picture got, and try to figure out the perfect time to post things in order to get the most likes. Sometimes my friends will want to go somewhere just so they can take a picture to post on their Instagram, or immediately scope out the best place for a photo-shoot immediately after arriving at an event (yes, this really happens). Every person I know who does this is a good person, but they still feel like they need validation of their looks and activities through the approval of others.

I will admit that I am just as guilty as anyone else of trying to ‘perfect’ my social media accounts in order to give off the best image of myself that I can.. Even though I said that my virtual identity didn’t stray too far from my real-life identity, it is almost impossible for them to be exactly the same. Social media gives people confidence, but not necessarily the best kind of confidence. It gives us online confidence, which I think can sometimes lower our real-life confidence, because it is nearly impossible to embody the perfect image that we have spent hours crafting online. I think that is where the idea of the loss of confidence comes into play, because even if you’re not comparing yourself to others, you are still probably comparing your real self to the perfect, virtual version of yourself that you have created.

 Just like it says in “The Self in Selfie: Identity in the Age of Social Media”, the majority of online comments are centered around looks, because that is what they mainly focus on. Instagram is an app solely to share pictures, which are many times selfies. When someone I know posts a gorgeous, perfectly angled and edited selfie there are always dozens of comments saying how hot/pretty/beautiful they look. Some days I will scroll through my Instagram and see ten selfies in a row, all edited and airbrushed to perfection. I sometimes wonder what the point of sharing a picture of your face is if you’re just going to change it anyway. The people who are liking it are most likely people who you interact with in person, so they already know that you don’t always have perfect makeup and skin. Then I realize that if I posted a selfie, I would probably want to make it look better than my real self too, because I would want a picture that hundreds of people are going to see to represent the best version of myself that I could create. Social media and virtual identities give people a chance to show off a version of themselves that they would not otherwise get to do. Without it, the person you are in real life is who you are to everybody, but with social media, you can choose every detail that you want to show off, and every detail that you don’t want to show off. In many cases, the identity that you create online is how most people see you, aside from close friends and family. A virtual identity gives you the chance to be whatever version of yourself you want the world to see, without all of the clumsiness or awkwardness that real life interactions entail.