Is your identity authentic?

Image: Instagram user sharing only a part of his/her life (Dhyani, 2016)

Authenticity is something we constantly hear about in our world. People seem to have this constant worry if others are being authentic or not. But are we right to worry?  Are the people we know in real life or on social media showing their authentic identity to us?

In this week’s reading it mentioned how Zuckerberg believes people are authentically themselves on Facebook. McNeill however agues this and states that generic questions are asked and it is hard to determine users ‘authentic identity’ by having the limitations of drop down menus (2012). It is difficult to say when one is being authentically themselves as one has many different states to their identity. Everyone shows different parts to different people but this doesn’t mean they aren’t being authentic. It just means that they are open about different parts of themselves with different people as their level of comfort varies.

Moreover, as Instagram allows users to share pictures, it gives them the ability to share different parts of their lives, from the big things to the small things (McNeill, 2012, p.71). The person that users choose to represent themselves as online to their followers may not necessarily be who they are with everybody as there is “this blurring of public and private” in the social media world (Kuttainen, 2016). People share intimate moments of their private lives that they usually wouldn’t share with people in their everyday lives. They choose which parts of their lives they want to share but that doesn’t mean they are being any less authentic. Our selfhood may seemed reduced online as we create these filters which stop us from sharing every detail of our lives, whether it be our religion, our interests, etc. The reality is that no one can really show a perfectly authentic representation of their life on social media. Life is too big to share every moment. We are able to show pieces to try and best represent the lives we live (Haley, 2014).

                                             

Bibliography

Dhyani, P. (2016). Half Cooked Half Truth: Reality behind the Instagram Images. [Image] Retrieved from Clickker: http://clickker.in/2016/08/25/instagram-photographs-image-filters-photography-food-reality-wren-kitchens/

Haley. (2014, September 12). Instagram envy, being authentic on the internet, and when it’s time to break up with a blog. Retrieved from Carrots for Michaelmas : http://www.carrotsformichaelmas.com/2014/09/12/instagram-envy-being-authentic-on-the-internet-and-when-its-time-to-break-up-with-a-blog/

Kuttainen, V. (2016). BA1002: Our space: networks, narratives and the making of place, Lecture 6: Networked narratives. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au

McNeill, L. (2012). There is no ‘I’ in Network: Social networking sites and posthuman auto-biography. Biography, 35 (1), 65-82. doi:10.1353/bio.2012.0009