Beware that Cool Self You Project

In August, 2013, R Kay Green described the “real self” and “ideal self”:

“Your "real self" is what you are - your attributes, your characteristics, and your personality. Your "ideal self" is what you feel you should be; much of it due to societal and environmental influences.”

It used to be that we aspired to be our “ideal self”. Some of us even put effort to make that transformation.

Those were simpler times. With the advent of social media, we found an easy way to project ourselves as being our ideal selves:

“As the use of social media continues to evolve; the concept of presenting our ideal selves versus our real selves has become more and more prevalent on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, and even LinkedIn.”

Joseph Goebbels once said:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

And so it is. Today, many assume our “ideal selves” as projected via social networks to be who we really are. Haley Mlotek learnt that the hard way when she looked for apartments to rent. Prospective landlords asked for her Twitter handle:

“The first time someone with an apartment available asked me for my Twitter handle, I laughed; the second time, I became confused; and by the third, I was perplexed and annoyed. Logistically, this made no sense. I have a distinctive last name and am easily found via a quick Google search. Couldn’t they just creep on me silently, like a normal person?”

And then it hit her as to why they wanted her Twitter handle (ID):

“These landlords and subletters had blown the lid off the whole thing by acknowledging that they were going to take my dumb 140-character musings as serious evidence of who I was as a person and not the carefully constructed signifiers of a Totally Cool Identity as I had somewhat deliberately intended.”

Funny how our cool selves can come back to bite us…