Digital Self: Who Am I in the Digital World
In this work "Who Am I in the Digital World Essay" we will research how technology influenced on us and how its changed our self, life. Before technology came, we have a simple life and there’s no secrets. We read books, write on a paper, travel to communicate with other people personally and many more. We show our feelings and express ourselves and called it our true self. Today, technology is everywhere. Most of us use technology because we think that it is really beneficial to us and makes our life easier but in technology we are also creating this digital self wherein we have a mask that protects us from insult and danger. We all have a "true self" that is complex and fragile, but ultimately, is our essence. A goal to share that self with the world, we seize our tempted selves to manage the day-to-day anxieties and challenges that come before us.
Digital self is what we are inside the digital world. All of this technology has come at us so fast and furiously that we haven't had the time to think about how our relationship with it shapes our very identity. What you post on Facebook, what you places you shares online, who you’re connected to on Instagram and the venues you check in the Twitter, all say something about your personality. And increasingly, it’s a process people manage with meticulous detail. What we watch, where we go, what we like and what we dislike online, are no longer random acts, but self-defining choices with meaning. According to Russel Belk in 1988, he believed that our possessions are major contributors and a reflection of our identities. Before, we love buying either colorful clothes or one specific color, eat foods or jewelries and everything that is considered as part of ourselves. Today with technology, we can no longer be away with our smartphones or gadgets.
We sometimes panic if we forgot it or lost it somewhere. Why do we have to have digital self? According to the researches, such as Stone (1996) and Hemetsburger (2005), we are trying to explore or experience different selves which differ from our true self like we want to meet the expectations of others, to boost our self esteem and the sense of belongingness. We, as individuals, have different ways on how we present or package ourselves in digital world. Just like me, I don’t give all my personal information in the internet to protect myself from danger but I’m more expressive in internet than in personal.
Others can’t control themselves from enjoying technology specifically the social medias. Some are just pretenders for example in internet they care but in the reality they don’t take it seriously. To protect ourselves from the digital world by having this digital self which creates our image in the internet specially the social networking sites. Those people who doesn’t know any information from you will believe in the descriptions that you indicate in your profile like the name, address, contact number and so on. They will think that it is really you in the way of your communication with each other which also involves the feelings of one another. More example is if they see in your profile that you liked a page about this celebrity, others will expect that you are a fan of that celebrity.
People nowadays taught that every information we found on the internet are all true. We don’t know the harmful effects of the digital world. In fact, the digital world has given us greater opportunities to express and show our identity in any form we want to. But what we all need to remember is: how will we feel if we go so far to express ourselves differently online that we forget what reality is, or worse, we end up begrudging it? The world today is digital and we, ourselves, construct in it.
