A few months ago, I deleted my Twitter and Facebook accounts and created completely new ones. There was an image I needed to project and I knew I had to be careful with what I posted. Through my new Facebook, I crafted a new image that isn’t really me, but it is an image I am comfortable showing others.
After all, I am not on Facebook — my image is.
Facebook doesn’t force me into any one identity, so I am capable of being multiple people at the same time. I’ve posted about Schrodinger’s cat, Rush Limbaugh and the San Francisco Giants. I seem equally invested in all these topics and they all contribute to my image.
Evidently, I am a physics enthusiast, a Limbaugh critic and a Giants fan — all at the same time. Even if it’s not actually true, I’ve created an image of a person who’s interested in all cultured things. How would a Facebook friend know if I’ve actually listened to Limbaugh speak or seen a Giants game?
No matter how unrelated my statuses are, they all reflect various parts of the image I want to convey. Social media is powerful in this way because it feeds on our human inclination toward simultaneous chaos and order. I don’t want to tie my identity down, and Facebook enables me to post things without an overarching structure. In other words, each random bit of Internet I choose to post lends a nuance to my online identity.
And yet, at any time I need, I can go back and discover that I’m the kind of person who likes movies with Ralph Fiennes, Langston Hughes’s poetry and parodies of Cormac McCarthy’s prose. After all, my Facebook statuses tell me so. I’ve contained my postings within the domain of my personal site and there they remain, available whenever I need to retrieve my identity. I’ve created a collage of bits and pieces of the Internet that project the image I want you to see.
There cannot be one identity that overrides another.
The “Christine Truong” who follows the National League West (I don’t really) is just as real as the “Christine Truong” who reads Langston Hughes (I really do). As far as my Facebook friends know, there is no formal source or definitive version of me. So, it is the things I’ve posted on Facebook that give my identity value. The images of Rush Limbaugh and Schrodinger’s cat give my image meaning, not the other way around.
Consider what we use to construct our identities: the thoughts, tastes or feelings that make us who we are. Facebook becomes a compilation of those things — status updates, YouTube videos or links to other sites — that tell a story of who we are. When we post on Facebook, we are saying, “I can’t tell you who I am, but here are some things that might give you a sense of what I am.”
The prevalence of social media sites, particularly Facebook, signifies an irrefutable truth: We create Facebook accounts to store our identities, but our identities are dependent upon posting images, videos and links — streams of megabytes that will one day disappear from their servers.
Reach the columnist at ctruong1@asu.edu or follow an online image of her on Twitter @ce_truong
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