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Social Media Identity

Decent Essays

Social media has the potential to connect with everyone at any given time. However, when we are plugged into this new digital world, are we really connecting with people? Are we utilizing our time wisely, are we focusing on important things in life, and are we even in control of our behaviors online?

Central to understanding technology and its intersection with the self is to ask the question, “Who is our online identity?” This question sparked a lot of discussions among me and my close friends who are more critical and pessimistic than me about the direction of the internet and social media. Indeed, with the boom of social media, more people than ever are exposing themselves to a greater audience. As a result, the concept of branding comes into place online, because it is the way we curate and craft our “identities” or who want to project online. At the same time, social media, while it is great to filter and connect with mass numbers of people, is lacking in real connections. Interestingly enough, social media is the one area in our life that blurs the divide between the private sphere and public sphere, because there is a type of online voyeurism that exists: we see into the small, perfectly curated window of another person’s life while also crafting our own window to select what other may see into our own lives. As clandestine participants of social media, voyeurism has given us the inhumane ability to desensitize: where it has made people comfortable with watching

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