In addition to character, Lucy thinks a lot about online “image.” She doesn’t like that she thinks about this at all—it seems somehow that “you’re not being fully truthful,” she says, to be so concerned about it. Yet, posting that you “got a 4.0 boosts your image,” Lucy says. “So things that I would post would definitely increase my image… . I don’t want to post something that might be inappropriate or not positive because I guess I do want to uphold that image that I have.”
In the survey, I asked students if they feel the need to be curators of a particular image. Seventy percent answered yes, and an additional 16 percent answered yes, to a degree.2 Several wrote that online image is important to think about because you have to consider the “audience” you are reaching; one of these students went so far as to say that “you pick a target audience (sometimes unconsciously) and you curate. You form your image and identity around whomever you’re trying to please.”
Some students didn’t think this was a bad thing. The fact that we can curate an online image “is kind of like putting on a mask,” one student wrote. Another felt that “it’s a game, it’s an art,” which can be fun and harmless. It “allows users to create an imagined identity,” a third student said. The problem for this last student is that these imagined identities “are often false” and, for better or worse, “these images are important, because they are shaping generations to have unrealistic standards for their life experiences.”
There was also a student who described the cultivation of image online as an opportunity to give “one version of yourself permanence and authority,” and another who argued that this image-consciousness “allows for creating those [positive] impressions efficiently.” Gone are the days when we floundered around the lunchroom, puzzling about the successes of the popular kids, or the successes of anyone for that matter. Now young adults have the “authority” to attack such problems “efficiently.”
Overall, students’ responses revealed that they feel a lot of frustration and stress in relation to their online images. Many expressed a wish that we didn’t need to worry about online image at all.
Asked whether people today spend a good part of their time considering their online image, one student wrote: “Very true. Our culture today is forming around ‘being happy,’ and although that is good, I feel people actively neglect the fact that life has ups AND downs. Therefore, social media is used only to highlight the ups of life, while the downs are more often internalized behind the walls of our bedrooms, homes and personal lives. Although I do not feel that social media is a place to air negativity, I think it is okay to not be 100 percent happy all the time, and social media promotes the latter to the extreme.” Yet another student wrote: “People want to see others as happy, and people are easily bothered by someone who confesses that they aren’t happy or aren’t what everyone wants them to be.”
Lucy is certainly showing a piece of herself online, and one that is connected to a certain version of reality, but many students feel like they’re required to be fake, and nearly all students complain that what people see of them online is often pretty far from the truth of who they really are. And the dissonance some students feel between what they put online and how they truly see themselves can become extreme.
WE ARE OUR PROFILES: THE “REPUTATION SELF” AND “THE MANICURIST”
College students are acutely aware they have an image not only to protect but to create. Doing so is important because a vast potential audience is out there waiting—waiting to be entertained but also to pounce when they see something they don’t like. If someone trips up and says the wrong thing, they might never live it down. However, students also feel like they have a lot of control over their profiles, that they must assert control over them. It’s essential to the construction, maintenance, and promotion of a certain kind of “self.” Most college students are highly aware of how to navigate the new public construction of self on social media, and many of them are incredibly savvy about negotiating exactly how they are seen by others. They worry about their image like celebrities and politicians with teams of handlers might, and these negotiations play into this pressure to appear happy at all times.
They are acutely aware they have reputations to protect—that they “are” their reputations.
Take Brandy, who spoke at length about the “multiple” kinds of “selves” we have today, and in particular about our “reputation selves,”—a phrase Brandy used in her effort to describe the public dimension of her online persona, which is multifaceted. “I feel like [the reputation self] is another ‘self’ that now, considering social media, is bigger than ever because there’s who you are in how other people see you,” Brandy says. She thinks that everyone has multiple selves: the physical, the spiritual, and now the reputational. “That’s a third version of yourself because you basically decide what you put out there and that’s the way you want people to see you,” Brandy explains. But she sees the “reputation self” as something new and particular to social media. “The way you want people to see you [online] isn’t a true reflection of yourself but that’s still a version of yourself,” she adds.
I ask Brandy why she thinks the online version of the self isn’t a “true” version. “Because it’s not real,” she answers simply. And here we come back around—as all my interviews seem to do—to the issue of appearing happy. “It’s not like you’re going to post about all the terrible things that you’ve gone through.” Brandy thinks that someone showing an authentic self is “something rare that you never see anymore.” When I ask her why, she responds, “Because I feel now, more than ever, especially with social media, you’re just given the term ‘profile’ and you are a profile.” This isn’t right, according to Brandy. People shouldn’t be just profiles because profiles can’t encompass all that we are. Brandy thinks the existence of social media profiles makes all of us try to fit ourselves into “boxes,” something she doesn’t like and doesn’t feel capable of doing herself; the “boxes” social media profiles allow are simply too general, like “partier” or “Jersey girl.” “You can’t really build a person in a checkbox kind of form,” Brandy says. “Now, since people are more exposed on social media, it makes them more anxious than ever that people are going to judge them, just because that’s what people will do.”
The way others perceive us is extremely important because of social media, in Brandy’s opinion, and this is due “to the fact that people are now able to know, if you want people to know, everything happening in your life on a second-by-second basis.” It bothers Brandy that what she sees her friends posting online is just a facade. When she goes to their pages, she thinks to herself, “This isn’t the real you.” Instead, “People have pressure now, more than ever, to project an image that everything’s peachy and wonderful in their life,” she explains. “It’s kind of like how everybody says with their high school reunion, they want to go back and show off how great their life is. It’s like that now, but you don’t have to wait for your ten-year reunion. It’s like that every day.”
Brandy isn’t immune to this pressure. When I ask if she ever gets caught up in this herself, she exclaims with a big laugh, “Absolutely!” But then she qualifies her answer, saying, “But it’s not with the intent to make, to project that I’m better than somebody else.” Sometimes Brandy feels guilty boasting, but everyone around her faces the same pressures and, as she explains, “You can’t help but get caught up in it after a while.”
The pressure is difficult to resist. Image, as the old slogan goes, is everything.
Hannah, the same young woman who can’t help comparing herself to her sorority girl roommate, really dislikes social media. It feels like an obligation and a not altogether pleasant one. “It’s time-consuming,” she says. “It’s so time-consuming… . I definitely feel like [social media] is a job, like, I have to curate everything I put on.” Hannah uses one of those words—“curate”—I heard often from students. But then Hannah offers up a new metaphor: t
he “manicure.”
“I think people want to manicure their lives and put up a facade that is what they want people to see instead of what their actual lives are,” she tells me. “I think we think that they’re successful, but I don’t think that they necessarily are. For example, I was talking about this in my family studies class the other day, when people have kids, and then they only post the things that are good about having a kid and they don’t talk about how the kid just threw up on them five minutes before they posted the picture. [Other people] think, ‘Oh, they’re a successful parent. They’re a happy family because these pictures all look so good.’ But then, in reality, the family can totally be failing. So we think that they’re successful, but that’s because they’re manicuring their presence.” Hannah has a lot to say on the subject. “This is definitely something I’ve thought about before,” she explains. “It is like a manicuring! It’s going to look perfect and … . it’s a facade. You’re making [your profile] exactly what you want it to be instead of being what it actually is.”
I ask Hannah if she “manicures” her profiles. “If someone puts a picture up of me online that I do not like, I’m like, ‘Please take that down. Please take that down, I do not appreciate that,’ ” she says. “But if someone puts up a good picture, I’m like, ‘Oh, leave it up, yeah.’ ” Hannah sighs heavily. “I think that’s why people like [social media]. It’s because they can manipulate it, and I’m definitely subject to that too. I mean, I definitely think about it, but not in the same way. I’m thinking more about if people are going to judge me if I put up something too personal.”
Brandy and Hannah are talking about something different from mere professional concerns—though they have those, too. They have an acute sense that the construction of the self online is a kind of performance. There have always been many dimensions of the self, and people have always had both public and private selves. But the online world has taken the construction of the public self to new extremes, requiring this generation (and anyone who operates on social media, really) to contemplate “self-image” in a far more heightened way.
THE THREE CS: CRAFT, CULTIVATE, CURATE (AND A “MARKETING CAMPAIGN FOR ME”)
To be human is to be social, and to be social is to have an audience. I live in New York City, and each time I ride the subway I have an audience—even if I’m not paying attention to it and my fellow subway riders are not paying attention to me. The same goes for those who grew up before the existence of social media. We’d walk the halls at school and sit in the lunchroom with our peers. Whether we realized it or not, we had an audience, and we played to it, too. There were informal rules about dress; there were attitudes and interests that divided us into groups; there were popular kids and unpopular kids, and you could move up and down the social ladder depending on how a particular audience perceived you—or didn’t. There were groups of kids who excelled at rising socially—the best and shrewdest manipulators among us—and there were those of us who bumbled along trying to figure out how everything worked, trying and failing, trying again and occasionally succeeding. But no one, not even the queen bees, explicitly spoke about audience and their particular, personal “brand,” which they needed to “protect.” We were utterly naive about this or, perhaps, blissfully unaware.
But, unless we become hermits, we live our lives amid a series of “publics.” There is an innocence to not having this responsibility openly and obviously sitting upon our shoulders, a freedom from actively knowing and having to manipulate and play to a variety of audiences. Until recently, it was the kind of awareness and knowledge that only a certain breed of adults—primarily academics, marketers, and advertisers—had to endure.
But today, many young adults are aware they have a series of “publics,” and they are growing up learning how to actively navigate and even manipulate their audiences to achieve certain outcomes. Because of social media, we are becoming master manipulators, constant performers, and no one is better at these endeavors than young adults, because they are learning earlier and earlier that these skills are central to success, either social or professional. In Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Sherry Turkle writes extensively about how social media and our technological devices have allowed us to engage in a near-constant “editing” of speech as we text and email and chat, which can make in-person conversation not only daunting but, for some, so anxiety-inducing that they avoid it altogether.3 After speaking with and surveying so many college students, I worry that they are not only learning to edit speech but also learning to “edit” their selves for “publication” online.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all my conversations on this topic is the language students use to discuss how they’ve learned to operate online. They often default to business jargon. The idea that we can “advertise ourselves” through social media is common, and one student went so far as to say that the image one cultivates on social media “can even be used to create a business of being ‘yourself’ online.”
The production of self is itself a business enterprise.4
Take Ming. Like Brandy, she is acutely aware of the importance of online image, but she resorts to business jargon to explain it. “It’s kind of like a marketing campaign for a company,” Ming explains. “You want to show off either the best parts of yourself, or you want to show off, maybe somebody’s an activist, and this is the part that they want the world to see of them. It’s not a core part of you, but it’s maybe an extension of yourself. The side that you like to show the world publicly.” Social media is the perfect framework for launching a particular self-image or for showcasing an especially promising aspect of a person’s life. Businesses have specialties—that’s how they succeed—and one’s online presence also requires focus, promotion, and specialization for it to “succeed.” Even when someone doesn’t explicitly intend to do this, it happens anyway. “I don’t think, for the most part, people intentionally think of it as, ‘Oh, this is a marketing campaign for me, and I want people to see all the best parts,’ ” Ming says. “[Social media] just naturally allows us to show everybody, ‘Hey, these are the cool parts of my life,’ or ‘These are the interesting things that I’m doing,’ while you can relatively easily omit the things that maybe you don’t want other people to see.”
This is another reason Ming uses business terms. She thinks that “certain industries” really pay attention to social media, and whether you have a “Twitter presence,” or “a blog that you keep that you feel represents your work or your social media identity.”
Another student, John, speaks of social media as a means for advertising the self. “I think [social media] is a good way to market,” he says. “I think you can market yourself through it. I think you can market your ideas through it. I think there’s a lot of good aspects like that. Marketing and staying in touch.”
When I ask John if he “markets himself,” he answers, “I guess in a way, yes. Because you, I, try to show myself in a positive light. I don’t try to be too negative or post bad, inappropriate things, and I post about internships that I get or these good things that I’m trying to do, like the job I want to get.” For John, social media is aspirational. He shows only his good side and references the things he wants in life. “In a way everyone is marketing themselves because in the end, someone, your boss eventually, is going to see it, and he’s going to like or not like what he sees.” John goes on to discuss his many criteria for posting, and as he’s listing these rules, he starts to laugh. “Yeah, I definitely make a conscious effort to only post stuff that is okay.”
Then there is the first student—though not the last by any means—who describes herself as a “brand.”
Fara is petite, with a delicate frame and long, silky black hair. She was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, and she is so soft-spoken during our interview that I have to repeatedly ask her to talk louder so I can hear what she’s saying. A senior at her public university, she, too, defaults to business terms
to describe her life online, but she does so in a far more intimate way than John or Ming. Fara is more like Cherese in the sense that her social media existence is central to her self-understanding. She is extremely shy in person, but on social media, she’s very outgoing. And she’s very serious about her profiles. She sees them as a public extension of herself, which means she must cultivate them carefully. Online image is everything for Fara, but unlike Brandy, she doesn’t think of this as “untrue” or false. But she does speak about reputation.
“I think of myself, like, my name, as a brand,” Fara says. “So I like to stay active on my social media platforms, but I choose, I select when I share… . I have a reputation and I need to protect it. So I don’t share things that are private, things that are going on in my romantic relationships. I’m very selective, I’m a curator.” As with many students, selectivity is important—both the frequency of posts and what you choose to post. You never want to share too much, and you only want to share exactly the right things. “If I think I’m oversharing, I would delete that post,” Fara explains. “It’s a matter of being careful about what you share, thinking about who’s reading, who’s looking at this post, because you never know if your professor looks you up and you’re complaining about her class.”
Fara’s notion that “her name is a brand” goes far beyond worries about professors or future employers. “Anything that is associated with your name, [future employers, everyone really] is going to find out, so that’s why I think of my name as a brand. I’m very careful about what I do online and how my online presence is.”
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