In this highly interconnected society, with more and more communication moving to the Internet, we are becoming less concerned with how we are perceived in person and more concerned with how we are perceived online. We are constantly critiquing our social media selves. I’ve begun to notice friends asking for advice on their online profiles — “Would people get this caption?” or “Is this picture of my pancake from this morning Instagram-worthy?” — more than they are asking for advice about their physical presence.
The problem with this trend is that, on social media, we are portraying our ideal selves rather than our real selves. Our ideal selves eat cinnamon chip French toast for brunch then jet to a tropical island the next day to drink mimosas with our sun-kissed model friends. Our real selves eat cinnamon chip French toast for brunch, Chipotle for lunch and half a pint of ice cream for dinner while spending the non-eating hours of the day stalking Gigi Hadid and her model crew on Instagram.
This disconnect brings me to my next point: if you’re not going to post pictures of your 6,000-calorie days, you can bet no one else is either. When you are looking at someone else’s social media page, you must be careful not to idealize them. I guarantee you’ll never see pictures of them carrying out mundane daily tasks or when they’re not quite at their best. I’ll never see a picture of Gigi Hadid after she has lost a pet, fallen ill or realized that she put the empty box of Oreos back in the pantry and there are no Oreos left.
If our online profiles are so curated and we are only portraying our ideal selves, how can we make true connections over social media? When we live through social media, we are objectifying ourselves. We are reducing our identity down to certain images we think will portray the best version of ourselves.
Another problem with these idealized representation is that it numbs us to life. Always looking at the perfect image on a screen makes day-to-day life seem imperfect or subpar. Looking at a picture of tulips in Holland that my friend just posted from abroad suddenly takes precedence over – excuse the overused idiom – stopping and smelling the roses in front of me. Constantly seeing the way other people experience things locks us into jealousies and we become disenchanted with our own experiences.
It seems like social media’s purpose of connecting people has taken a back seat to its unintended purpose of feeding the egos of the self-interested. Certainly there are still people who use it to network, to check in on a far-away friend or to congratulate the newlyweds. However, the frequency at which I see people agonize over their “like-to-minute” ratio scares me. People seek the esteem boost that virtual likes can provide, but wouldn’t it be better to have your “real self” experience that esteem boost?
We should put less time into our crafting ideal selves and more time into our real selves. We must be aware of whether we are presenting an accurate depiction of ourselves to the online world if that is where we wish to carry out our interactions.
Avery’s column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at a.moyler@cavalierdaily.com.
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