“What we like contributes to the picture of who we are,” writes Kimberly Hirsh about constructing identity online, “but what we want people to know we like does even more so, I think.” I don’t have anything insightful to say about this at the moment except that I wanted to wonder whether this outward-facing curation has anything to do with the how and the why of some people thinking that online is not real life even though we outwardly curate ourselves offline, too. Also, it made me think about my observation that I don’t have a stable or constant sense of self, and I wish some outside omniscience could look back over my life and see how both my sense of self and my outwardly-curated identity varied over time, and to what degree they did so in sync or at odds with one another.
Published to write.house by Bix Frankonis. Comments and replies by email are welcome.