Scrolling through Instagram recently I came across a video of a bloodied man in an alley. The man had clearly been assaulted. The perpetrator was none other than “The Rock” Dewayne Johnson, who held the victim with a tightly clenched fist near a director and a camera crew that had just stopped filming. The Rock was shouting something that suggested he was beating the man not for spectacle — The Rock recently reentered the world of professional wrestling — but simply because he wanted to. The assault was likely staged, representative of the postmodern tradition of camera footage of what happens when the cameras are shut off. But it was disturbing nonetheless. Evil assailant The Rock is I guess now one of the The Rock’s many identities, an emerging identity or perhaps one he has recently reclaimed (as I was thinking about this The Atlantic just published a weirdly positive take on the Rock’s various identities). Personally, my favorite Dewayne Johnson is not the former wrestler or the new mobster scumbag but the charismatic, huggable, proud Samoan; this The Rock of the American popular imagination is the one that some hoped could maybe even run for president and save us all from our awful polarized geriatric politics. But this guy wasn’t and couldn’t simultaneously be that other guy. Inside The Rock there are apparently two wolves (two wolves is a popular, possibly problematic meme about identity). Now I don’t know which one is going to show up in my feed. And so I unfollowed the Rock.
Most people sharing to social media these days will encounter a flattening of their various social spheres and identities into one feed. Academics call this “context collapse”. In my own weird online world everyone is out there kind of mixed up: my high school friends, fans of my band, contemporary artists and curators, etc. A younger me was preoccupied with somehow unifying these various identities and spheres into a singular life and a singular Me, maybe the “true” me. We humans naturally have this internal desire to feel whole and complete. Perhaps, the external pressure to consciously and deliberately organize our lives and online identities thusly had reached its zenith about ten years ago (this was coincidentally just about the time that I had mostly completed the process of trading my youthful identity as a rock singer and songwriter for that of a serious contemporary artist and art professor).
This widely-shared Mark Zuckerberg quote sums up that broader cultural moment: “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or coworkers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Zuckerberg and other Silicon valley titans actually helped to usher in the age of permanently collapsed contexts. Not because of their concerns about integrity — never forget that Zuckerberg is a man whose entire net worth was built through a platform he created to rank the hotness of young women in the ivy leagues — but because it’s more profitable to allow addictive flattening algorithms to replace the discernment of human actors. For a while now we have mostly lacked the tools to tailor our “content” toward specific audiences. Instead, we trust the algorithms to serve the appropriate content to the appropriate audiences, even as those algorithms often get it wrong (I have no interest in brutal street fights, for example). Ten years after Zuckerberg’s pronouncement, has the wind shifted? Or the technology? Have we?
Here on Substack I feel like one wolf. Even though I don’t get a lot of likes or feedback, writing does give me a feeling of freedom I don’t necessarily feel in other arenas. Writing is essentially thinking, and it is all these different me’s thinking all these thoughts about all these various things, they get funneled into this one writer-identity rather than splintered out. Text is just so functionally different then memes, images and short-form video. Takes a long time to write. It takes time to read. While social media gets faster and faster, I recognize the enduring value in the lack of ease of dealing with text, the “friction” of its consumption, to use the tech parlance. But on most platforms, performing identity — actually let’s just call this being — is confusing by design.
Early iterations of social media tools allowed users to group their “friends” into various categories. Those tools are largely defunct. Instead, the easiest thing to do now is to accept collapsed contexts or to simply create different profiles or accounts for various pursuits or aspects of our identities. I currently have four (!) Instagram profiles that function as means to group my various audiences and aspects of my identity: artist/art professor me, songwriter music me, nonprofit director me, and Chinese language learner/vaguely interested in self-improvement me (note that two of these profiles contain two identities!). On Facebook, a platform that I now rarely use, I have even more. Is my life too complicated? Am I? I don’t think so. I think a lot of people operate in multiple contexts. It’s just that artists are so obsessed with identity that we are more likely to both have anxiety about identity when it doesn’t seem unified, and more likely to splinter ourselves deliberately as we move through various media and various pursuits. Note that our tools today do not easily allow us to group our friends; they allow us to divide ourselves.
This switch from grouping our relationships to splitting ourselves into multiple selves is not trivial. To me, it represents a reimagining of what not only digital life represents but of how we see ourselves in the world at large. Does this shift away from the singular self at the center of various shifting contexts and towards multiple selves oriented towards distinct arenas more closely represent the way we live our offline lives?
We don’t go to church in a swimsuit. We don’t share our darkest secrets with our judgmental coworker. We are different in different contexts and so our online profiles may need to more deliberately reflect that. Perhaps so many of us today have multiple accounts for various aspects of us identity because of an inability to change what I will call the Everything Channel. Maybe this is a good thing. The everything channel is exhausting. But I do not want to give any credit to the developers of online tools. Rather, these multiple selves were born out of necessity for digital natives. Social media platforms merely adapted to this desire, to the reality that our lives and thoughts and pursuits are complex, by making it easier and easier to create and switch between profiles.
A while ago I finally came to terms with having distinct audiences, different interests, distinct phases of life and on some level even different me’s. I now have largely abandoned the project of unifying my identities as a cerebral painting professor making innovative intermedia works and the singer/songwriter for an aggressive melodic rock band. This decoupling has been liberating and wonderful. Perhaps you yourself are struggling with attempting to unify multiple pursuits or identities? Particularly if you are The Rock Dewayne Johnson and one of your identities is wholesome and one is a back alley assailant — decoupling and creating multiple accounts is something I highly recommend.
You raise some really interesting points about how we use social media. I was never one to have multiple accounts for various facets of myself -- partly because I saw myself as a single package, but mostly because I was afraid I'd cross the streams and post the wrong thing on the wrong page. But now I'm considering it in order to tweak my algorithm.
My parents recently passed, within 11 months of each other, and I'm still very much in the drowning stage. For lack of better grief support in my area, I've reached out online and found some accounts that have been really helpful. But now the algorithm is bombarding me with grief-related content. Sometimes I just need space to be a mom, a writer, a wannabe artist, a teacher, a science nerd, without being constantly reminded every third post that I'm an orphan.
Sometimes I like the algorithm. It brings me content I wouldn't ordinarily find on my own. But it can be very one-note.
So now I'm rethinking how I use social media. I thought I was using it to connect with friends, but I find myself posting less and less now that my parents are gone. Maybe now is the time to shift my approach to it, and make it less about what I am putting out and more about what I would like to bring in.
Great post. Thanks for sharing.