Photo Credit: pexels.com
It’s a question that people have puzzled over ever since the creation of social media more than a decade ago: How much of what we post online is actually an expression of our true self? The answer to that question is more subtle and more nuanced than you might think. When there were just a handful of social media platforms, it was easy to say that people were living completely fake lives on Instagram or Facebook. But as the number of social media platforms has proliferated, it’s becoming harder and harder to pull that off.
As some social media commentators have pointed out, we are all stars of our own reality shows these days. Yes, we can try to polish some of the rough edges, but when the cameras are on us 24/7, it’s becoming increasingly hard to hide who we really are. That’s why brands and advertisers encourage us to leave behind as many clues as possible, so that they can figure out what makes us tick. They’re interested in what we like, what we re-post or share, and how long we stay engaged with a certain piece of content. By studying all of these tiny clues over a long enough period of time, they can come up with remarkably sophisticated models of how we might behave in the future.
Online personas
For more than a decade, researchers have been studying the relationships between our online and offline personalities. One popular viewpoint is that we all have multiple online personas, each one optimized as much as possible for a specific social media platform. While each personality might be slightly different, they all lead back to the same core personality. Thus, we might be a total show-off on Instagram, a narcissist on Facebook, and an inveterate internet troll on X. While each of these online personas might be slightly different, it’s hard to ignore that they are all part of the same core persona.
Generally speaking, the more hours we spend online, the narrower is the gap between our online selves and our in-real-life selves. Thus, if we only spend an hour a day on social media, there is likely to be quite a gap between our online persona and our real-life persona. But if we spend 8 or more hours on social media (i.e. all of our waking hours outside of school or work), then the online and offline personas are more likely to converge.
Can social media help us lead our best life?
For teens and young adults especially, social media can be a way to “try on” different personas, to see which one fits. That might help to explain why many introverts in real life are actually quite extroverted online. Or why many people who are quite nice and rational in real life are the ultimate internet trolls online. Social media is helping them fill some need or gap in their lives, sometimes in very unpredictable ways.
And that leads to the interesting question: Can social media help to change who we really are? For example, many researchers have noticed how gaining a large number of followers on social media can be a way to gain real-world self-confidence. So maybe that same concept can be applied to other parts of our lives. If we are not feeling fulfilled in the workplace, for example, then social media might be a way to fill that gap and establish a sense of purpose.
How fake is social media, anyway?
Putting all this together, it might be possible to say that many of the most elaborate personas we see online are completely “fake.” As a general rule of thumb, the more that a social media platform encourages you to have tens of thousands of followers, the more “fake” you probably are on social media. And, obviously, social media platforms that emphasize photos and videos are probably going to be more “fake” than social media platforms that are text-centric.
However, the more social media platforms you’re on, the harder it is to fake it. And the more content you share with your friends and followers, the harder it is to fake it. Until the moment comes when we’re living 24 hours per day on social media, there will always be some sort of gap between the online and offline worlds. But that gap is now getting narrower and narrower.
