Is who we are affected by what we post?
Our second project brief prompts us once again to look inwards rather than outwards. We are encouraged to ask, ‘who am I?’, to consider all of the things, the facets that define our very identity and being. Being asked to define yourself in a one minute video seems like a daunting task when all of us are so complex, so cliched; we all have clashing interests, opinions, passions and personalities. I love heavy metal yet can’t stand loud noises, I love to travel yet have a fear of change and being away from home. Identity and belonging is a topic much debated, little understood, and one that I have been interested in and often found myself involved in attempting to understand through reading, writing and even attempting to identify myself. It was the main topic last year that our English class covered, and perhaps because of the broadness of such a topic, one of the easiest to draw out of any text. Even while watching the most abstract film, aspects of it can always be interpreted to suggest something or impart something on the audience about identity, whether that be about their own, the creator’s or simply identity in general.
Perhaps the most interesting discourse on the topic of identity is that of the changing definition and the way the new generations of digital natives identify themselves in regards to media and technology. The invention of the internet and smartphones has revolutionised how we see ourselves and others. Social media now has a disproportionate influence over what we like, how we act and what we look like. One example of how pervasive and influential social media can be on the younger generations and their identity is the story of Essena O’Neill. A teenager from Australia, O’Neill had over 612,000 followers on Instagram and marketed products to her followers in exchange for money. In November of last year, Essena deleted over 2000 of her photos and edited the remaining pictures’ captions, writing to her followers that the ‘perfect’ life she posted in her photos of poolside afternoons, healthy food and parties was all a lie, formulated to gain followers and attention. She wore dresses and had photos taken, posing as though she was attending a party, only to then change into pyjamas and stay home. She sucked in her stomach and obsessed over her body image, ate food she hated and changed her very being in order to appear likeable, relatable, living the ‘ideal’ Australian beachcomber babe life. It poses the question; how many of us are different in reality to the person we present to the rest of the world on social media? Nobody lives an entirely “instagrammable” life, nobody has the “perfect” body. Media, constant advertising and indoctrination and, in fact, simply the pressure to appear better to others makes younger people act in a way that is not authentically them. We spend so long on our phones that we forget who we truly are.
Social media and the inauthenticity that it creates along with it is something that has really interested me. I hope that when I present not only my self portrait work, but indeed myself to the world, that I am truly myself, not someone hiding behind a smokescreen created by the media that I consume and am surrounded by on a daily basis.
