socialmedia – Got Najaf's Blog

In this epoch of life, people are getting obsessed with social media, who now believe that every present moment needs to be experienced and saved as something that will be reflecting upon them later (that they concluded as in their future). Some people take it upon their-selves to design how that later moment will be going to feel like. To do so, they carefully curated Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and with many more filtering apps on social media people are trying to reach unfathomable aspects of life. This generation increasingly gets to have a sense of authorship over how to present them to the world that could see their (so-called) ‘life’, as a piece of virtual art. As Jason Silva said:

We are living in the two realities at the same time.

Social media has fabricated different ways in which you essentially get to dictate; you get to construct the way to other people perceive you. So each and every person considers is that the most important thing is to build social proof on social media. They use social media as a tool to build their own reputation; Why? Because you can mold it, you get to shape it or you can make it look like whatever you want it to look like. In other words, you think that every person you talk to they’re gonna go through your accounts like through your Snapchat, through your Instagram, through your TikTok; whatever you got to see what you’re all about. So to look perfect you mold your pages to best represent yourself on the social media platforms.

There’s a philosopher and a sociologist by the name of Charles Cooley, who wrote about the ‘Looking The Glass Self Theory’ in which he argued that we come to be through the interactions that we have with the other people by making models of the other person’s mind and what he wrote is that;

I am not who I think I am, I am not who you think I am, I am who I think you think I am.

In other words, he has highlighted the facts that we make rending of what other people think of us and we’re playing a role of becoming we think they think we are; and that raises all kinds of questions about the fluidity of our identity about the interface with other minds with other people.

But in reality, it’s you that the people are looking for. I mean is that people wanted to meet the original YOU, without any filters. Although sooner or later you couldn’t be able to hide how you are from the inside i.e. your original-self. And on that moment when people meet you in person they would be like, ‘Wait what?’; this is because social media has created you a perspective that people have started to perceive you from that platform, where your caption represents your thoughts and your post or feed represents your personality. But in the end, you never actually get to know other persons mind and all we get to know is our modeling of their modeling of us.

I guess perhaps what we should do is to come clean about this fact and stop pretending to look (COOL!) in the ways that we present ourselves artfully on social media, and instead accept the fact that our identity is a fluid art of improvisation and our self is not a solid think and it never has been.