“The entire world is a stage and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”
William Shakespeare
In real life, we always allow ourselves to play the best role in different situations. For example, in the school in the serious study and self-discipline of students, in the home, obedient children, married to become a qualified wife or husband, as Goffman said, “people play all the roles to be in a different state of flux”. Some of them are forced to put on masks because of the changes in the roles themselves, while others are “unreal selves” that are shown on one’s own initiative.
The social world is internally differentiated in terms of domains, presenting a multiform structure. From roles that were originally typified by each other in real life due to institutionalisation, to virtual online roles and identities due to mediatisation.
What is the role of identity in the digital world？
Satisfy people’s emotional needs:
Because of not being restricted by geography, you can show yourself to your heart’s content and gain more recognition. It also provides more channels of expression, as well as great freedom and anonymity.
However, we should be more concerned about the negative effects of digital identity！
- lose oneself: In the process of constantly presenting the character you want to present, you can become dependent in the digital world and forget about your real self;
- Becoming more anxious: Seeing other people’s good state of affairs and comparing it to your own bad state of affairs makes you sad and anxious;
- Being in an unsafe digital world: Because of their virtual nature, digital identities are both fake and real. It is easy to deceive by this means. In addition to this, due to anonymity, people can post statements online with impunity, which can lead to false information as well as cyber violence which is like thousands of invisible and sharp knives;
What can we do？
- Setting up laws and regulations in the digital world institutionalises identity at the level of consciousness;
- Weakening the virtual nature of online identities to a certain extent, making them less transparent in order to increase people’s self-initiative;
Reference
Scannell, P.,2007. Media and communication. SAGE.
Couldry, N.& Hepp, A, 2017. The mediated construction of reality: society, culture, mediatization. Polity.
Haziq, S.,2019. Putting the best digital self forward in the age of Social Media, [Online] Apr 16. Available at: https://medium.com/@haziqsabreen25/putting-the-best-digital-self-forward-in-the-age-of-social-media-d3dbec422b73.
Great blog post! I enjoyed reading it, I acknowledged the fact you talked about different aspects of digital identity such as the negative effects and what we can do as digital users of this generation. Do you think it is possible to be our best possible selves in only the strict and professional situations such as when we are students or always be our best possible selves even when we are in much more of a relaxed situation?
I’m glad that you enjoyed my post. I don’t think people should be pigeonholed in nature, they can be versatile. But in this society, as we are herd animals, we have to have some humane laws and regulations to restrain people’s behaviour for better social development. For today’s digital society, I think it is similar to the primitive society of human beings, there are no complete laws and regulations yet, so we have to have the ability to distinguish between right and wrong in the digital society. I always believe that there is no judgement standard for the best self, the only thing that can be used as a reference is to ask yourself if you are happy on every new day.