The question, "Who am I?" is a question that causes people of all ages to stop and ask themselves at some point in their lives. Similarly, "What does it mean to be me?" is another thoughtful, introspective question that often causes much distress in someone who is pushed to answer. The difficulty often comes from people struggling to find the words that can describe themselves the best. For example, there are many ways to describe someone who is funny. Is he hilarious or is he more sarcastic? Depending on the slight change of a word, one can think of someone entirely different. Therefore, overall, being able to establish a firm identity is very challenging task for most, especially since there are two types of identity: personal identity and social identity.
Personal identity regards what one thinks about themselves and what stories one decides to tell other people about themselves. This identity is the identity that one prefers to be viewed at by people. Social identity, however, is based on what others think of oneself and the stories they tell regarding oneself. The article, "How Nostalgia Went From Being A Mental Illness To An Internet Phenomenon," was written to explain how nostalgia helps create social identity.The author, Heba Hasan, does a great job explaining just how nostalgic apps can be. Timehop, for instance, is an app that is strictly about looking into past tweets, facebook posts, instagram posts, and more. The app has gained million of downloaders within a year who simply just love the idea of looking back at their lives and reliving the moments they once though were important enough to tweet or post about.
According to Mun-Young Chung (who is currently working on his dissertation on media and nostalgia at Penn State University), "After sharing media content on a social network you have a feeling that you are a part of a certain generation and you're more likely to want to connect with other people who share the same nostalgia as you" (Hasan). Why else do people post pictures on Facebook and Instagram other than to let the world what they are doing? Interestingly enough, I never really thought about what social networks really entail until I read this article, which put it in perspective. All social networking sites are just outlets for individuals to establish a social identity. People are in control of what people see about them, which is why most people try to post as many photos of themselves at vacations and parties and social events since it enhances their lives on their internet profile.
Considering our generation is the generation that has established the idea of "facebook stalking," it is not uncommon to think that people set their profiles up a certain way so that they can be the most appealing. By only posting certain photos. tweets, statuses, etc., one is establishing a social identity for themselves. For instance, someone can seem like a very sociable person who is very much into the "party scene," because of all the red cup, large crowd snapchats they post everyday. Yet, the same person would never put up a picture of themselves just sitting eating a tub of ice cream and watching ten seasons of a show on Netflix on a Friday night. Therefore, profiles online are very subjective and work towards manipulating social identities. More importantly, people like reminiscing on things like old prom photos or tweets about how much you loved NSYNC because it is an indication of how their social identity was at some point in time. The online world has become a permanently view-able resume of one's social identity.
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