Narcissus by Caravaggio
As soon as Sophie had closed the gate behind her she opened the envelope. It contained only a slip of paper no bigger than the envelope. It read: Who are you?  -
Jostein GaarderÂ
Jostein Gaarder introduced me to philosophy, and furthered my interest in how people define personality, particularly in relation to themselves. A teenager when I read Sophie’s World
Nowadays, it seems like personalities are not so much formed as crafted. That one good photo you took that ended up on your Facebook profile dictates how you style your hair for the next month; all your friends are fans of “ Joe Blog ”, so you should be too. Your day passes, step by step; or should that be tweet by tweet? You backed out of the party you didn’t want to go to, saying you were ill, but now you’re stuck at home with nothing to do, unable to go online in case one of your friends notices you there and quizzes you.
The internet can be useful; it can be a tool, a portal, or a dictator. It can give us access to our closest friends twenty-four hours a day if we so desire; and allow us to see what our enemies and exes are doing if we are curious. Online, we have the freedom to switch personality; the freedom to choose who we are, what we look like, the expressions we use. We can blog under a different name, using words we would never use, punctuating our sentences with things our nearest and dearest would never recognise as our own.
Most people do not. Most people seem to use the internet for what it is; a way of keeping in touch, finding things out, working, living, playing… quickly. No longer do people set aside an afternoon for a phone call, no longer do they sit indoors playing bridge on a rainy evening, no longer do they spend three hours drafting a letter they may or may not send. The phone call happens via an instant messaging service, the game is an application on a social networking site, the letter an email they wrote as they were typing and did not check.
Yet how, from this, do we build who we are? Can we trust people’s instantaneous reactions to what we’ve posted on Twitter? Our associations shape and influence us in many ways; some obvious, some subtle. Yet now we have more acquaintances than ever before, from places we might never have heard of had it not been for the internet. Gone are the days when people grew up knowing those in the surrounding villages, being involved in their lives, in their decisions. Now a fifteen-year-old on a forum in the UK might have friends in Massachusetts, Mumbai, Melbourne.
When we had ships, we traded goods. When we had planes, we traded places. Now that we have this digitised, somewhat ethereal thing called the internet, we trade in something far more subtle. We give and receive parts of our personalities, our experiences, our feelings, our whole lives, to people we have never met and are unlikely to see face-to-face. We ask the opinion of ‘experts’ on Twitter for all to see: ‘What should I do?’ ‘Should I wear the red one or the blue one?’ ‘Is he cheating on me?’ The fact that all this has been accepted as the norm is quite terrifying when considered seriously. Yet it is useful, and I for one would be lost without the internet, without my means of instantaneous intercontinental communication which allows me to be ‘in the office’ whether I’m at home, on a train or in a restaurant.
What do you think? Are we becoming so ‘digitised’ that we are losing parts of ourselves? Or is the internet giving us the opportunity to grow in ways that would have been impossible only a matter of decades ago? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
About the author: Scarlett de Courcier - is Publisher Manager at Unruly Media, and is known among colleagues as the ‘social media junkie’. In addition she is Acting Research Assistant at Oxford University . Check her profile on LinkedIn
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