#WhoAmI: An Evolving Existential Crisis

#WhoAmI: An Evolving Existential Crisis

(Preach, Kris. Preach.) 
Image Source:http://www.buzzfeed.com/carolynkylstra/cell-phone-detox#.rcb5LbAD2

I recently attended a Shabbat dinner where in keeping with the tradition and religiosity of the event, I decided to leave my phone at home (not to mention it was dead, and I had no pocket to keep it in, but that is neither here nor there). I have never really thought of myself as a “technology addict”, like some people we all know.

I always have my phone on me, but it’s not because I need to. I use social media, but I don’t rely on it. I check my e-mail every ten minutes because I want to, it’s definitely a choice. So, going 2 hours without my phone should have been fine, right? What I realized that evening is that my phone is not just something that I carry around with me and check when I am bored. It is a lifeline. It might as well be a part of my physical being. I kept finding myself reaching for this object that was not next to me. Reaching for my phone is an action ingrained into my muscle memory. My hand is no longer a flexible extremity but a tense claw. Throughout the evening my brain was racing, thinking of the e-mails, Instagrams, Facebook chats, text messages, etc I was missing. What if someone posts a totally heinous or inappropriate picture of me and I’m not there to remove the tag?! A future employer might see it and then I won’t get hired and I’ll never get a job and then what was this all for?!

(I feel you, Tina) Image Source:http://www.sharegif.com/tag/tina-fey

Clearly I am more dependent than I thought.

This event led me to evaluate my use of technology, how I engage with my digital world, and where this dependence truly comes from. I asked myself why I feel this need to be connected. I think that a large part of this reason is simply because I have to. The world is more instantaneous than ever before. It is not only assumed but also expected that we are plugged in and that a response in some way, shape, or form will follow within a timely manner, only that timely manner is getting shorter and shorter. As an employee, student, and leader I am evaluated by my communication abilities, both in person and also online. The faster I am able to give an answer or response the more helpful, impressive, and dedicated I appear. This is important to me. I like being my boss’ favorite employee or someone that people know they can depend on. But for me, technology use goes far beyond work and easy communication. As a social person I enjoy being connected and in the loop with what is going on, and much like the expectation that we are always ready to respond, social media has made it so that socializing is a 25/7 activity. You unplug or chose not to engage and you undeniably tie yourself off to part of the social scene, a scene that when a constant in your life can be exhausting. Knowing so much about what is happening within our social worlds, our communities, and the global world gets overwhelming.

I pushed myself to think about the digital world and our dependence on it within the context of a bigger picture. What I eventually came to is that this connectivity issue and the struggle between being over or under connected is rooted in the notion that our lives, in many ways, are defined by this digital world, and what’s more is that we have the ability to define ourselves, form our personal identities through these methods. My enjoyment of being a top notch employee is in part because I am a people pleaser (no shame), and also because I like to think that the better I use these technologies the more trustworthy and dependable I appear. I want people to define me by these characteristics.

As humans we are tangible people. We like to know, understand, touch, see, hear, have. Identity formation before we had status updates, profile pictures, and hashtags had a much lower tangible quality to it. We could define ourselves by titles, relationships, experiences and the most physical, material goods. But social media has changed all of that. Now every memory has a picture associated with it, every relationship has a physical marker of "In A Relationship" on our Facebook page. Before the internet we could not update our Instagram profile to read “Yoga lover, coffee addict, and aspiring blogger ” followed by a string of emojis. Instead there was an internal understanding of who we were both inside and out. Maybe this intangibility made it harder to have a full understanding of our identity and led to the anxiety that many face when asking that fateful question “who am I”. While the "identity crisis" is still something that plagues millennials, and the “who am I” question is definitely still relevant, it seems that new issues have arisen in thinking about the context surrounding that question. Now, we have more than enough mediums available to us to give us a means to define ourselves.

“The question isn’t ‘what do we want to know about people?’, it’s, ‘what do people want to tell about themselves?’”- Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerbergs’ words could not be truer in analyzing how users choose to use social media. A study conducted by Jose Van Dijck at the University of Amsterdam compares and contrasts LinkedIn and Facebook helping us to understand how users engage with them and it also sheds some light on Zuckerbergs’ comment. Both sites have virtually identical interfaces, profiles and timelines, ability to add friends/connections, share, like, search, and find (Van Dijck). However, each platform allows the user to express themselves in different ways. LinkedIn is a professional networking site, so the user treats it as a means to self promote. Facebook is a social media site meant to help people communicate and connect for casual purpose, unlike the identity that users form for LinkedIn, there is a different goal in mind for Facebook which aligns more with self expression (Van Dijck). No matter the different methods in which we choose to promote our identities, these sites give us the narrative to assume, create, define an identity that we deem worthy of being shared.

“… a narrative… triggers a new awareness of how you want your life story be told, to whom and for what purpose…Each decision to customize your Timeline implied not only a decision about the (private) reassembling of one’s past life, but also a conscious effort at (public) identity shaping. “ (Van Dijck)

These sites allow us to say, “This is who I am world! Hire me, be my friend! I’m worth it.”

Image Source:http://theawesomegifs.tumblr.com/

Here is the problem that I see. While these types of sites allow identity formation to take place, when does it become too much? Personally, when I look across my social media accounts I see different versions of myself that I actively promote. One is for business, one is for my peers and family, one is for my followers, and so on. I'm starting now to question if any of these identities are authentic? When we have the ability to edit and design, we aren’t coming into ourselves and our identities but rather tangibly creating them. Is that real? The question has evolved from the personal “who am I?” into a question dependent on others opinions, “what do I think others want me to be? And how can I alter my digital world to reflect that?”.

In thinking about the variety of mediums that are open to us in our identity formation I came across a Ted Talk given by Barry Schwartz, author of “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less”. The book discusses how the vastness of the world and internet lends to a paralysis and inability to make decisions, and the negative effects associated with that. He explains that this problem of having too many options, whether it be the plethora of salad dressing options in the supermarket or choosing a profile picture for our Facebook, is a unique problem to our developed, consumer driven 1st world country. Schwartz explains that in fact what enables choice is material affluence. He elaborates in his talk that “choice makes it possible to do better, but feel worse”, because with so many options available to us also comes the expectation that among all of the options there must be a perfect choice; the more we have to choose from, the closer we can get to ultimate happiness. Unfortunately for us, nothing is ever perfect so the individual feels less satisfied even if they are happy with the option that they chose. Schwartz used the example of buying jeans. There are thousands of styles, colors, cuts of jeans nowadays, but for some reason the pair we deem "the best" always seems to have a flaw; the color might fade, or they shrink in the wash. Something puts that doubt in our mind. When this happens, the consumer will look to find a cause for their dissatisfaction and eventually comes to the conclusion that, in fact,  they must be the problem, the thing holding them back from perfection is themselves. This train of thought unquestionably leads to self-doubt and loathing. Option provides a vicious cycle for consumers, and as consumers of apps, social media sites, and technology we fall victim to that in our digital realities.

Soon after watching Schwartz’s Ted Talk, I stumbled upon a paper that BuzzFeed founder, Jonah Peretti wrote. In the beginning of the paper, Peretti argues that the vastness of the internet allows us to create and shed identities like never before and that this ability is actually causing a lack of understanding about our own identities.

“The internet is one of many late capitalist phenomena that allow for more flexible, rapid, and profitable mechanisms of identity formation.” Jonah Peretti

Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution

In my own life I face this very issue. On Facebook I am "Susannah- the fun loving, 21 year old, college gal, who is just trying to live it up". But when I get a text from my mom telling me to take down the last few pictures I posted because "what were you thinking" I get confused and think "If I take these down, how will people know that I am 'Susannah- the fun loving, 21 year old, college gal, who is just trying to live it up?'". What happens if my Instagram doesn't have any pictures of Kale smoothies, or of me doing Yoga by a beach? Will my followers, some people I have never actually met, not think I'm trendy?! In reality, I hate yoga (I actually really do enjoy kale smoothies #basic). #WHOAMI?! By continually assuming, forming, shedding, and reassuming we become more anxiety ridden and confused.

Ironically Peretti went on to create the one of the most utilized tools in our digital repertoire of assuming and defining our identities with BuzzFeed quizzes. A user can very literally click on a series of pictures and find out “who they are” in the context of celebrities, food, drink, leisure activities, weather, etc. Recently I have found out that based on my zodiac sign I am most compatible with Hermione Granger of all Harry Potter characters, that because of my “dark sense of humor” but “light, fun energy” I am Rocky Road Ice Cream, although when taken a second time because obviously I didn’t want to be Rocky Road, I got my all time favorite, Cookie Dough. Identity gained, shed, and gained again! Thanks, BuzzFeed. I also learned that according to BuzzFeed and their “What Kind of Technology Addict Are You?” quiz, I am a “high functioning Junkie”, just in case you were curious. #themoreyouknow.

Peretti’s initial argument about how we form, and keep forming identities (as proven through my own use of BuzzFeed) brought me back to Schwartz’s argument that the more options we have the more dissatisfied we tend to be, and the more we blame ourselves for our own unhappiness and problems. Internet users may assume that they can alter that newfound negativity by assuming a new identity, creating a post that shows that they are actually a fun, interesting, and outgoing person, but this vicious cycle just persists. The more social media options that are open to us, the more identities we can and do assume, however this really just lends to us being more confused with a true sense of identity and instead of feeling like we understand ourselves that much better, we feel more lost and confused about who we are and who we want to be. In a time when "defining" yourself is the easiest it's ever been, we are more unsure of ourselves than ever before. With the ability to be anyone, we feel like no one.

Image Source:http://giphy.com/search/who-am-i

I thought back to that Shabbat dinner. My connectivity issues are directly related to this ingrained feeling inside of me that every moment I am not checking, updating, or posting is a moment that I am not in tune with part of myself, to the part that helps me understand who I am and who I aspire to be. All of my anxieties surrounding future employment and jobs, typical “fomo” when I am in one place and my friends are in another, the fear I experience when I see that Facebook notification “someone has tagged a picture of you”, all stem from this heightened awareness that I can control and edit who I am. This surveillance over our own activity is exhausting. I don’t want to be as self centered and self aware as social media has made me, yet as I scroll through my Instagram and realize I don’t have enough “funny/cute/candid” pictures to reflect my funny, quirky, easy going personality, I realize that, no matter how much I want to, I can’t stop.