GE 1 UNDERSTANDING THE SELF

CHAPTER II
UNPACKING THE SELF

Lesson V: Who Am I in the Cyberworld? (Digital Self)

The number of people who are becoming more active online continues to increase
worldwide. More than half of the population worldwide now uses the Internet. It has only been
25 years since Tim Berners-Lee made the World Wide Web available to the public, but in that
time, the Internet has already become an integral part of everyday life for most of the world’s
population. The Philippines is among one of the countries with the most active Internet users
(We are Social and Hootsuite, n.d.).
● Almost two-thirds of the world’s population now has a mobile phone.

● More than half of the world’s web traffic now comes from mobile phones.

● More than half of all mobile connections around the world are nor “broadband.”

● More than one in five of the world’s population shopped online in the past 30
days.

Media users in the Philippines grew by 12 million or 25% while the number of mobile
social users increased by 13 million or 32%. Those growth figures are still higher compared to
the previous year. More than half of the world now uses a smartphone.

Online identity is actually the sum of all our characteristics and our interactions while
partial identity is a subset of characteristics that make up our identity. Meanwhile, persona is the
partial identity we create that represents ourselves in a specific situation.

Selective Self-presentation and Impression Management

According to Goffman (1959) and Leary (1995), self-presentation is the “process of
controlling how one is perceived by other people” and is the key to relationship inception and
development. To construct positive images, individuals selectively provide information about
them and carefully cater this information in response to other’s feedback.

Anything posted online should be considered “public” no matter what our “privacy”
settings are. Personal identity is the interpersonal level of self which differentiates the individual
as unique from others, while social identity is the level of self whereby the individual is
identified by his or her group memberships.

Belk (2013) explained that sharing ourselves is no longer new and has been practiced as
soon as human beings were formed. Digital devices help us share information broadly, more than
ever before. For those who are avid users of Facebook, it is possible that their social media
friends are more updated about their daily activities, connections, and thoughts than their
immediate families. Diaries that were once private or shared only with close friends are now
posted as blogs which can be viewed by anyone. In websites like Flickr or Photobucket, the use
of arm’s-length self-photography indicates a major change. In older family albums, the
photographer was not often represented in the album (Mendelson and Papacharissi, 2011),
whereas with arm’s-length photos, they are necessarily included (e.g., selfies and groupies). In
addition, the family album of an earlier era has become more of an individual photo gallery in
the digital age. As Schwarz (2010) mentioned, we have entered an extraordinary era of self-
portraiture. Blogs and web pages have been continuously used for greater self-reflection and self-
presentation. Facebook and other social media applications are now a key part of self-
presentation for one-sixth of humanity. As a result, researchers and participants become
concerned with actively managing identity and reputation and to warn against the phenomenon
of “oversharing” (Labrecque, Markos, and Milne, 2011; Shepherd, 2005; Suler, 2002; Zimmer
and Hoffman, 2011). Sometimes people become unaware of the extent of information they share
online. They forget to delineate what can be shared online and what should not. Furthermore, it
provides a more complete narration of self and gives people an idealized view of how they would
like to be remembered by others (van Dijck, 2008). Many teenagers, as well as some adults,
share even more intimate details with their partners like their passwords (Gershon, 2010). This
could be an ultimate act of intimacy and trust or the ultimate expression of paranoia and distrust
with the partner.

Because of the conversion of private diaries into public revelations of inner secrets, the
lack of privacy in many aspects of social media make the users more vulnerable, leading to
compulsively checking newsfeeds and continually adding tweets and postings in order to appear
active and interesting. This condition has been called “fear of missing out.” People would like to
remain updated and they keep on sharing themselves online because it adds a sense of
confidence at their end especially if others like and share their posts. One of the reasons for so
much sharing and self-disclosure online is the so-called “disinhibition effect” (Ridley, 2012;
Suler, 2004). The lack of face-to-face gaze-meeting, together with feelings of anonymity and
invisibility, gives people the freedom for self-disclosure but can also “flame” others and may
cause conflict sometimes. The resulting disinhibition causes people to believe that they are able
to express their “true self” better online than they ever could in face-to-face contexts (Taylor,
2002). However, it does not mean that there is a fixed “true self.” The self is still a work in
progress and we keep on improving and developing ourselves every single day. Seemingly, self-
revelation can be therapeutic to others especially if it goes together with self-reflection (Morris et
al., 2010). But it does appear that we now do a large amount of our identity work online. When
the internet constantly asks us: “Who are you?” and “What do you have to share?” , it is up to us
if we are going to provide answers to such queries every time we use the Internet and to what
extent are going to share details of ourselves to others.

In addition to sharing the good things we experience, many of us also share the bad,
embarrassing, and “sinful” things we experience. We also react and comment on negative
experiences of others. Sometimes, we empathize with people. We also argue with others online.
Relationships may be made stronger or broken through posts online. Blogs and social media are
the primary digital fora on which such confessions occur, but they can also be found in photo-
and video- sharing sites where blunders and bad moments are also preserved and shared
(Strangelove, 2011). Why confess to unseen and anonymous others online? In Foucault’s (1978,
1998) view, confessing our secret truths feel freeing, even as it binds us in a guilt-motivated self-
governance born of a long history of Christian and pre-Christian philosophies and power
structures.

According to Foucalt (1998), confession, along with contemplation, self-examination,

learning, reading, and writing self-critical letters to friends, are a part of the “technologies of the
self” through which we seek to purge and cleanse ourselves.
Despite the veil of invisibility, writers on the internet write for an unseen audience
(Serfaty, 2004). Both the number and feedback of readers provide self-validation for the writer
and a certain celebrity (O’Regan, 2009). Confessional blogs may also be therapeutic for the
audience to read, allowing both sincere empathy and the voyeuristic appeal of witnessing a
public confession (Kitzmann, 2003).

Consequently, we should have a filtering system to whatever information we share

online, as well as to what information we believe in, which are being shared or posted by others
online. We should look at online information carefully whether they are valid and true before
believing and promoting them. In the same way, we should also think well before we post or
share anything online in order to prevent conflict, arguments, and cyberbullying, and to preserve
our relationships with others.

Gender and Sexuality Online

According to Marwick (2013), while the terms “sex,” “gender”, and “sexuality”are often
thought of as synonymous, they are actually quite distinct. The differences between the common
understandings of these terms and how researchers think about them yield key insights about the
social functioning of gender. Sex is the biological state that corresponds to what we might call a
“man” or a “woman.” This might seem to be a simple distinction, but the biology of sex is
actually very complicated. While “sex” is often explained as biological, fixed, and immutable, it
is actually socially constructed (West and Zimmerman, 1987). Gender, then, is the social
understanding of how sex should be experienced and how sex manifests in behavior, personality,
preferences, capabilities, and so forth. A person with male sex organs is expected to embody a
masculine gender. While sex and gender are presumed to be biologically connected, we can
understand gender as s socioculturally specific set of norms that are mapped onto a category of
“sex” (Kessler and McKenna, 1978; Lorber, 1994). Gender is historical. It is produced by media
and popular culture (Gauntlett, 2008; van Zoonen, 1994). It is taught by families, schools, peer
groups, and nation states (Goffman, 1997). It is reinforced through songs, sayings, admonition,
slang, language, fashion, and discourse (Cameron, 1998; Cameron and Kulick, 2003), and it is
deeply ingrained. Gender is a system of classification that values male-gendered things more
than female related things. This system plays out on the bodies of men and women, and in
constructing hierarchies of everything from colors (e.g., pink vs. blue) to academic departments
(e.g., English vs. Math) to electronic gadgets and websites. Given this inequality, the
universalized “male” body and experience is often constructed as average or normal, while
female-gendered experiences are conceptualized as variations from the norm (Goffman, 1997).

Sexuality is an individual expression and understanding of desire. While like gender, this
is often viewed as binary (homosexual or heterosexual), in reality, sexuality is often experienced
as fluid.
Performing Gender Online
Theorist Judith Butler (1990) conceptualized gender as a performance. She explained that
popular understandings of gender and sexuality came to be through discourse and social
processes. She argued that gender was performative, in that it is produced through millions of
individual actions, rather than something that comes naturally to men and women. Performances
that adhere to normative understandings of gender and sexuality are allowed, while those that do
not are admonished (for example, a boy “throwing like a girl”) (Lorber, 1994). In the 1990s,
many internet scholars drew from Butler and other queer theorists to understand online identity.
According to the disembodiment hypothesis, Internet users are free to actively choose which
gender or sexuality they are going to portray with the possibility of creating alternate identities
(Wynn and Katz, 1997). The ability of users to self-consciously adapt and play with different
gender identities would reveal the choices involved in the production of gender, breaking down
binaries and encouraging fluidity in sexuality and gender expression.

Recently, social media has been celebrated for facilitating greater cultural participation
and creativity. Social media sites like Twitter and YouTube have led to the emergence of a “free
culture” where individuals are empowered to engage in cultural production using raw materials,
ranging from homemade videos to mainstream television characters to create new culture,
memes and humor. At its best, this culture of memes, mash-ups, and creative political activism
allows for civic engagement and fun creative acts. While Digg, 4chan, and Reddit are used
mostly by men, most social network site users are women; this is true in Facebook, Flickr, Live
Journal, Tumblr, Twitter and YouTube (Chappell, 2011; Lenhart, 2009; Lenhart et al., 2010).
But mere equality of use does not indicate equality of participation. While both men and women
use Wikipedia, 87% of Wikipedia contributors were identified as male (LaValle, 2009). Male
student are more likely to create, edit, and distribute digital video over YouTube or Facebook
than female student. However, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found no discernible
differences in user-generated content by gender except remixing, which was most likely among
teen girls (Lenhart et al., 2010). One explanation for this differences is that user-generated
content is often clustered by gender. Researchers have consistent shown that similar numbers of
men and women maintain a blog—about 14% of Internet users (Lenhart et al, 2010). While the
number of male and female bloggers are roughly equivalent, they tend to blog about different
things. Overwhelmingly, certain types of blogs are written and read by women (e.g., food,
fashion, parenting), while orhers (e.g., technology, politics) are written and run by men
(Chittenden, 2010; Hindman, 2009; Meraz, 2008). Although the technologies are the same, the
norms and mores of the people using them differ.

Setting Boundaries To Your Online Self: Smart Sharing

The following guidelines will help share information online in a smart way that will
protect youself and not harm others. Before posting or sharing anything online, consider the
following.

● Is this post/story necessary?

● Is there a real benefit to this post? Is it funny, warm-heated, teachable—or am u just

making noise online without purpose?
 ● Have we (as a family or parent/child) resolved this issue? An issue that is still being
worked out at home, or one that is either vulnerable or highly emotional, should not be
made public.

● Is it appropriate? Does it stay within the boundaries of our family values?

● .Will this seem as funny in 5, 10, or 15 years? Or is this post better suited for sharing with
a small group of family members? Or maybe not all?

Rules to Follow

Here are additional guide lines for proper sharing if information and ethical
Use of the Internet according to New (2014):

● Stick to safer sites.

● Guard your passwords.

● Limit what you share.

● Remember that anything you put online or post on a site is there forever, even if you try
to delete it.

● Do not be mean embarrass other people online.

● Always tell if you see strange or bad behavior online.

● Be choosy about your online friends.

● Be patient.