S7E8 - My Online Persona

Who are you?

What is your real self?

How would your close friends describe you?

Forming our ‘selves’ is a lifelong, intense process, especially while we're young. It is also heavily influenced by our physical environments & the people in those environments.

To establish our ‘selves’, we all experiment with different interests, ideas, and, above all, self-presentations.

By self-presentation, we mean how we package and edit ourselves for our social interactions.

You see, self-presentation is not a bad thing, but quite normal.

It is the reason why your tone might change when speaking to a stranger, the reason why your appearance may change when going on a blind date, and the reason why you might list out all your qualifications before giving a public speech etc.

We are social beings, and we always want to present ourselves to others in ways that are favourable. That seems fair.

But here is where the wicked problem lies.

Unlike face-to-face settings, our self-presentation on social media cannot be applied to one-to-one conversations.

Instead, our self-presentation on social media has to be broadcasted and publicised to everyone at once, in a one-to-many form.

This can be a problem because if we are inclined to present a favourable ‘self’ that can cater to our huge, diverse social media audience, this means that we may exaggerate and dramatise the way we package and edit ourselves.

So in this episode, we spoke about our personal experiences of self-presentation online.

We spoke about how social media provides us with a whole lot more ways of experimenting with ways of crafting different ‘selves’, whether or not our online self and offline self hugely differ, self-presentation gone crazy, and self-presentation in online dating.

We think this is a very important way of looking at our digital hygiene, and understanding its impact on ourselves and those we are connected to.

And this is why we deliberately put ourselves on the line to evaluate our self-presentation. And we did so in the hope that our (attempted) transparency will encourage you to make your own evaluation.

Enjoy the listen!

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