In 2016 I posted a short article titled “Your Online Persona is More Real Than You”. Deep in the hunt for a stable, full-time job at the time, it was a rumination on how the growing ubiquity of the Internet was changing so many facets of societal interaction—especially in terms of finding employment. Rereading the article, I find that I still basically agree with its points today. Perhaps the title was a bit too provocative, but the observation that social media accounts—as frivolous as they may seem—are almost a prerequisite for proving that you are indeed an actual, real-life person, feels as relevant as ever.

About a week after publishing that article, I finally landed the exact job I’d been searching for. Guess I really knew what I was talking about, eh? And yet now, over four years later, I can’t help but dwell on the obvious flaw in my theory. Assuming that piece’s line of thinking about online personas and authenticity was correct, it still begs the question: “More real to whom?”

Uh oh, here comes the Hackers movie imagery again….

Quick tangent: I think that personality quizzes are complete nonsense. I mean like all varieties of them, from horoscopes to Myers–Briggs; just total bunk. And the reason I think that is because everyone’s personality is different in different contexts. Depending on what role you are playing, who you are around, and your role’s relationship to everyone else’s—not to mention your physical state at the time, if you’re tired, hungry, nauseous, intoxicated, etc.—we all will act very differently. A self-reported survey cannot tell you what your true personality type is because such a thing does not exist. It can only categorize your state of mind at the time in which you answered its questions.

Sociologist Erving Goffman described this phenomenon as far back as 1956 in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. There he used the theater as a metaphor for all our various social interactions. Much like in a stage play, how you act and what you say are determined by the role you are playing at the time. As he explains, basically every social interaction is like this, with you performing a specific role and everyone you interact with performing their specific roles as well. Depending on the situation, you might act entirely differently, as it is dependent on the current context. (Hopefully, if you are fortunate enough to live in a safe and loving home, that space will feel a bit like being backstage, allowing you to relax and drop most pretense for a time.)

This idea rings very true to me. My identity and personality tend to be rather fluid, highly dependent on my environment, my current physical state, the people around me, and the context all parties inhabit. You are certainly not the same person today as you were a year ago, but you’re not necessarily even the same person throughout the day.

While you are probably not a completely different person in different contexts, you certainly are not 100% the same. The context will shift whether you are working at your primary job, working at your side-hustle, working on your passion project/second side-hustle, going on a date, going to a job interview, hanging out with friends at bar, attending a church service, meeting a professional contact for coffee, having dinner with your family, having dinner with your partner’s family, or writing your erotic fan-fiction involving various characters from Star Trek: TNG and the 90’s cartoon Gargoyles. Different audience, different context, different you.

The identity you project in each context may cast a new light on certain elements of your real self, but none of them are all-encompassing. No single identity you inhibit is the complete you. Because again, your personality changes based on the context, and the context changes based on the intended audience. So your behavior naturally adjusts based on who you are communicating with, or to put it in Goffman’s theater metaphor, who you are performing for.

Which reminds me of the best advice my Mother ever gave me: Know Your Audience. (And seriously, read the room bro.)

So what does any of this rambling have to do with online personas? Well, as amazing as the Internet is, it does a really terrible job of communicating context. In fact, the modern Internet—and social networks in particular—are basically designed to remove all context from communication.

Researcher Danah Boyd is credited for coining the term “context collapse” to describe the situation in which we increasingly find ourselves, wherein different contexts collide together and make it difficult to know how to behave or communicate. This is not an exclusively online phenomenon, of course. At weddings, for example, we bring our families, friends, coworkers, Ultimate Frisbee teammates, MMORPG guild members, etc. together from distinct and separate spheres of our life into one place, and that can make finding the proper behavior rather tricky. But the situation is exacerbated by social networks, which thrive on universal connectedness and “open communication”. Context collapse is basically the beating heart of Facebook.

What ends up happening in the new networked world is that communication tends to become generalized for a more universal audience. Instead of personalized messages delivered to specific people, the new paradigm demands that we share our thoughts publicly, in some cases with literally every person we’ve ever known.

So in order to adapt to the new meta-context, we adjust our communication style. Many of us heavily self-censor, or only post the blandest, safest, most milktoast version of our thoughts possible, in an effort to keep all communication appropriate for any and all parties who might possibly come across it online, now and into the distant future. Unrelentingly boring is actually the only communication style guaranteed not to rock any boats.

Ok, so that’s a little sad. But does that mean you can’t be yourself on the Internet, or that your Internet self is actively making the real you a duller, less interesting person? Well I can’t say for certain, but I’m fairly confident the answer is BOTH.

Look, the Internet doesn’t communicate the reality of you, because it can’t. The Internet is incapable of transmitting the reality of anything in the first place (with the exception of computer games, I suppose). Nothing tangible can be shared online, the Internet can only transmit a representation of a thing. Likewise, it is only a representation of you which gets communicated over the Internet.

Your Internet identities—plural, as they’re probably a bit different from one platform to the next—are just a handful of the many identities which make up your complete, three-dimensional self. They also tend to be the most obviously contrived and artificial identities we have; easily whipped up to convey the desired lifestyle one wishes to project out to the world, and just easily edited, altered, optimized. And yet your online personas are still the identities most easily verifiable by the outside world, hence my original article.

So where does that leave us? Let’s see….

The Real you is a multifaceted, three-dimensional, living being, an actual person whose behavior is highly adaptable to—if not wholly dependent on—the context of your current moment, and thus largely defies classification beyond a shallow pass with fleeting accuracy at best.
Meanwhile, your Online Persona can be constantly surveilled, analyzed, categorized, targeted for micro-advertising, and otherwise exploited by the corporations who trade in your metadata, personal details, and overall aggregated digital presence. The real you might be hard to pin down, but your online persona can easily be bucketed into one or more useful demographics and sold for a profit.

So back to our question: “More real to whom?” Well, your online persona may seem obviously less real to you, but for our server-based corporate overlords, it’s really no contest.