After a whole week of study and reading, I think I have a deeper understanding of Construction of Identify in a digital world. I finished reading the book Key of media theory this week. At the same time, as an extracurricular hobby or to help me better understand the theoretical research of media, I also read “Introduction to Metaphysics”. If we want to understand a problem or study these problems more deeply, we can learn through practice on the one hand. But at the same time, pure rational reasoning can lead to some extraordinary results. This is what we call metaphysics. This is very important, and philosophy is one of the most important tools for us to learn communication as a discipline.
Going back to our content today, this topic mainly explores the influence or shape of each individual, each different individual in the current era of Internet or digital media. It also addresses the expression and management of their personal identities.
As the Chinese junior high school ideological and political lessons say. Everyone has a different identity, can be a father, husband, son, employee, leader and so on. The emergence of the Internet has further expanded our individual identities. This is important, but we also face some problems, such as online identity, we will create a personal image of ourselves on social media, by taking photos, videos and text to create a persona that we want to create on the Internet. It’s also the first image that other people have of us when they’re browsing the Internet. But at the same time, there is another problem, anonymity and camouflage. And of course if we talk about anonymity and camouflage we inevitably talk about digital privacy and data security.
There are all kinds of demons and monsters on the Internet, and there are also many lawbreakers. We want to protect our personal safety and information security to the greatest extent possible. So when you create an image, it may be very different from your real life self. This is great for helping us keep ourselves safe while allowing us to temporarily disconnect from reality.
Just like the “super dream” in Cyberpunk 2077, you enter a world that does not exist and then temporarily escape the suffering of reality.
But of course, what we’re talking about today is not reality versus fiction. At the same time, the topic is too big. We need to look at this in more detail. So what I want to talk about is anonymity and camouflage.
In this day, we really have a thousand faces. Everyone on different platforms can have different “people” to play different people in different community groups. For example, a person on X could be a member of Parliament for a far-right party. But at the same time she can be a porn creator who posts her toes on only fans. The two are not in conflict. Or we could even just build a completely fictional person on Instagram with the best life and perfect family. Great wealth, luxurious houses. Travel and eat every day. These things are hitting everyone at the same time. This also leads to another issue, the influence of social media. It creates anxiety and so on.
