Who Do I Want To Be: Online Identity and Me

By Y. Hope Osborn

Who do you want to be? You might want to ask, who am I, but to ask who do I want to be is opportunity to direct yourself. It is the driver’s seat in real life and your online identity. Who am I was a common question found in a study of personal web site designers as written up in “We Are What We Post: Self-Presentation in Personal Web Spaces” by Hope Jensen Schau and Mary C. Gilly. 

How do you want to take control right here, right now, from this moment, forgetting everything you have already identified with online—avatar, blogger, Facebook friend or Facebook Page business owner, or personal web site creator? We can’t erase what we have already sent out across the perpetuating web, and that point is all you need to remember to move forward. Read Benjamin Eggleton’s blog, “Psychic Energy and Vulnerability: Confession or Exhibition.” for more on the ramifications of this as it pertains to sharing yourself and your online identity record. What brands we associate with, how we react to comments and likes, what aspects of ourselves we share are important in creating our online identity because the web is a permanent record of that self.

In Popular Communication “Verified: Self-Presentation, Identity Management, and Selfhood in the Age of Big Data” Alice Hearn writes, 

Beneath the gauzy promises of democratized access  to sociality, meaning, fame, and reputation, the business practices of the social platforms in and through which we  self-present draw us all into privatized corporate strategies of social sorting, identity management, and control. (63) 

If we can’t do much about who we were or are, we can do something about who we want to be. We can take control, but there are a few pitfalls to be wary of and they have to do with the idea of consumerism. Consumerism is the theory that an increasing consumption of goods is economically desirable or a preoccupation with and an inclination toward the buying of consumer goods. 

Consumption of goods is not just about shopping on Amazon. When you focus your Facebook posts towards the things that get the most likes or comments, you are buying or find desirable attention or a boost to your self-esteem or maybe your own consumers for a product or service you offer or you are drawn into “privatized corporate strategies” so they can make you into the image they need for their product (For more on this subject read, “Machine Learning and Media Bias” by cgpearce). Consumption of goods doesn’t have to be bad, but in the case of your personal online identity and driving the car of your online identity, it can be rocky terrain. 

The writer bell hooks understood these driving forces as “spaces” into which society places us. She pushed against “who am I” expectations for gender and race to imagine the possibility of “who do I want to be”  in my life. Her very name exemplifies this creating her own way. Though born Gloria Jean Watkins, she chose not only to change her name, but also to change capitals to lower case letters by calling herself bell hooks. She authored many works under this defining name, not bound by those beside, inside, or outside forces. 

Taking the Wheel

What does that mean for us in the age of Big Data as Hearn calls it, and what does that have to do with moving forward, creating ourselves to be who we want to be in online identity? We move forward. As bell hooks writes in “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” 

Moving we confront the realities of choice and location … do we position ourselves on the side of colonizing mentality? Or do we  … offer our ways of seeing and theorizing, of making culture, towards that revolutionary effort which seeks to create space … where transformation is possible? This choice is critical. It shapes and determines our response to existing cultural practice and our capacity to envision new, alternative, oppositional aesthetic acts, it informs the way we speak about these issues, the language we choose. (203)

We confront those inside, outside, and beside forces not to be without the car or who I am, but we take the driver’s seat, directing our own life to shape who we want to be. You create the map of the way you decide to drive. 

How do we do this on the web? bell hooks wrote in the same article, “spaces can be real or imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated, and transformed through artistic and literary practice” (209). Our spaces are more and more online and it is through the artistic and literary practices of web design, coding, blogging, graphic design, and so forth that we do as bell hooks did in creating herself, from her name to her ideas, and turn to our imagination. You imagine an empty space with you in it, the you who you were, and the you who you are and push out the expectations and driving forces to envisioning who you want to be. 

It is like those signs that say, You Are Here, so now you imagine who you want to be and place those things in your space both in real life and in online identity. Just sit down one day in the quiet and imagine all the possibilities, remembering you still are a presence in this moment with a history that you don’t just throw away, but that you build on. It is the ground on which you lay the map of your real and online identity. 

This defining of one’s self whether as a blogger, gamer, or content producer is in writers’ terms your ethos—it is your credibility. It becomes not only who you want to be but whom people rely on or have confidence in to be. All those likes and comments feel good momentarily but if we forsake quantity and focus on quality, we drive ourselves toward meaningful, loyal connections. That gaming avatar’s looks may get attention, may bet you followers, but are they the flaky to wolf whistlers or are they meaningful, loyal connections who inside or outside of the game, have your back and your best interests in mind?

I won’t make any suggestions for your dream to be because then I become one of those forces who drives your car and creates your map for you. I become the person who shapes who you are rather than you. You have the freedom of choice to be who you want to be. Just sit down one day without distractions, without forces and consider the meaningful, credible, and incredible person or identity you want to be off and online.

Works Cited

Schau, Hope Jensen and Mary C. Gilly. “We Are What We Post? Self-Presentation in Personal Web Space.” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 30, no. 3, December 2003, pp. 385-404. JSTOR.

hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin As a Space of Radical Openness.” Readings in Contemporary Rhetoric, edited by Karen A. Foss et al., Waveland Press: Long Grove, IL, 2002, pp.235-242.

Hearn, Alice. “Verified: Self-Presentation, Identity Management, and Selfhood in the Age of Big Data.” Popular Communication, vol. 15, no. 2, 2017, pp. 62-77.