Spot the difference
Version 1: Like many people, my life is guided by routine. Or, if not my life exactly, then at least the secret, miniscule details that constitute my life, such as personal hygiene. Each morning I brush my teeth up and down, going from right to left as if I were reading a Chinese book. I soap the right arm before the left, and scrub my cheeks in a counter-clockwise motion before lathering my forehead. After breakfast, I proceed to the toilet with all the pomp and inflexibility of a royal coronation, sitting on my throne for, at most, three minutes, until all the accumulated filth of the night before starts gushing out. I always close the toilet lid when I finish.
Version 2: Like many people, my life is guided by routine. Or, if not my life exactly, then at least the little details that constitute my life, such as personal hygiene. My personal habits have the efficiency of a machine, to say nothing about the consistency of my bowels when I get up in the morning. This is a discipline instilled by years of going through the same motions, fine-tuned to the point where my body simply moves of its own accord. I am, in short, a temple of utmost reliability and discipline.
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Granted, using personal hygiene to illustrate my point may be stretching it a bit, but, as I’m sure you’ll agree, nothing screams “personal†more than information about the precise timing of your bowel movements.
Which brings us to the two versions mentioned above. Version 1 is drawn-out, obsessive, and can be described as a thoroughly enthusiastic example of oversharing. On the other hand, Version 2 is pompous and inflated, with less detail and more adjectives. It isn’t oversharing, however; rather, it’s an example of self-promotion, or self-exposure. In the former, I am simply painting a picture of the ins and outs of my daily bathroom life, while in the latter, I am deliberately leaving the finer points to the reader’s imagination telling, but not showing. Oversharing carries with it an inflated sense of self-importance, one that is largely unconscious, but made apparent in the tremendous detail in which one can go on and on and on about her daily bathroom habits. Self-exposure is less arbitrary, more focused in its goal to make something which you think is laudable about yourself, known to the rest of cyber space.
Both are fundamentally harmless, if not outwardly annoying in unmanaged doses.
Now the question is: where do you draw the line? Can you draw a line? Our engagement with social media fluctuates between opposing states of exhibition and inhibition, authenticity and deception, self-exposure and self-preservation. The line between oversharing and self-exposure is an extremely relative one, drawn according to each user’s perception of his or her own importance. Talking about yourself is, after all, very much like sex, or like eating a whole bar of chocolate, according to recent studies. The rush of endorphin, the high of a status update written in all-caps, the tremendous feeling of self-worth brought about by a few simple likes and retweets it’s an experience that trumps eating chocolate (but probably not sex) on every level.
Now imagine using either Version 1 or 2 as the introductory note to your profile page. Expect to be laughed off, scorned, or even admired for the absolute brazenness (or weirdness) of it. After all, the act of creating and maintaining profiles on social networking sites is an important part of contemporary culture, a ritual not to be trifled with or made light of. Indeed, people go to great lengths to project a certain kind of self onto the little piece of cyberspace they inhabit; in each case projecting a self that is already edited, filtered, and censored.
Thus, in the age of social media, your identity is about as malleable as a slice of gelatin. Selective self-presentation is key, where users reveal themselves in thin layers, through small doses of encrypted text. More often than not, the dirty laundry is usually kept out of sight, except when used as fodder for a certain kind of identity being projected the bad boy, for instance, or the rebel schoolgirl. We are the look-at-me generation, known as much by the kind of profile information we relay as the kind of online company we keep. And in line with the democratic philosophy behind social media, participating in social networking is all about sharing yourself or your constructed identity with others.
But no matter the kind of strategy we employ in our obsessive maintenance of online selves, on the Internet, we’re ultimately just a body of text. Creative textual production is another way of constructing identity. In the realm of social media, we are only ever shadows of our real selves.