Character setting for construction of identity in the digital world

Throughout China’s 5,000-year history, people have used certain symbols to represent their identity. At that time, the meaning of these objects was simply to prove “who I am”.

And with the growth of the Internet, people are learning to build their social identities online, and as small as this can be a representation of part of a person’s personality, as large as it can be the sum total of all information about a person.

At the same time, the construction of identity in the digital world is extremely flexible; this identity can be subjectively hidden, changed or even discarded by the owner.

In our daily life, we always hear people around us tell a joke, the content is “outside the identity is self-given”, when strangers ask themselves questions about their own information, some people choose not to tell the real information about the individual to say, but to tell strangers a false information, for example, I went to school in Cambridge, I’m a national athlete, etc., and maybe get a word of admiration from the stranger.
Although this is a kind of joke among contemporary teenagers, it is not a kind of identity construction, which also refers to the so-called character setting.

The word character setting has a very important place in the construction of people’s identities today. For example, on social media, everyone wants to show their best side to others by posting nice photos of themselves, their happy life, etc. Few people choose to show their vulnerable side to the public, and it is during this time that the character setting is slowly created, which is the external personal image that each person creates for themselves, unintentionally or intentionally.

Tiktok about all kinds of popular bloggers, whether it is sharing life vlog category, or beauty category and other categories, MCN will be based on the final desired effect combined with the blogger himself for the construction of the character setting, the purpose is to attract the audience through the persona.

Of course, if the character setting is too contrary to the blogger’s own, there is a high risk of it being overdone, leading to fans discovering that their favorite blogger is very different from what they see on the internet and becoming disillusioned.

So constructing identities in the digital world is a matter of caution. One should be careful that one’s information is not leaked, one should also be careful that one’s reconstruction does not have a greater impact on oneself, and at the same time one should be even more careful in recognising the identities constructed by other people in the digital world in order to beware of fraud.

Reference:

Ertzscheid, Olivier. What is digital identity? Issues, tools, methodologies. Trans. Helen Tomlinson. Marseille : OpenEdition Press, 2016. Web. <http://books.openedition.org/oep/1235>.