Week 6: academic literature

Zhao, S. (2005). The Digital Self: Through the Looking Glass of Telecopresent Others. Symbolic Interaction, 28(3), pp.387-405.

Looking further at academic research, i came across a journal article called Through the looking glass of Telecopresent others- written by Shanyang Zhao. The article researches and discusses how people present their self to others when they become anonymous in the online world. As well as this they question how people come to conceive their selves when taking part in the virtual.

Zhao begins by explaining that when using the internet, it creates a specific 'looking glass that produces a digital self that differs from the self formed offline'. Here Zhao suggests that we separate our online and offline identities. We create two different identities, while they are similar, our online identity can be formed and altered to preferences that are not achievable in reality's time frame. Zhao continues to explain that our 'digital self is constructed through online interaction' and 'is therefore more oriented towards one's inner world, focusing on thoughts, feelings and personalities'. This further suggests that the more we tend to our digital self, the more we feed our emotions into it and become attached. The more we express our craves and alter our digital self to suit our emotional needs.

The scholar further explains that 'the proliferation of self in cyberspace has largely been explained largely in terms of the detachment of the self from the body...as others cannot see who we really are, we are free to claim to be whoever we want to be'. This implies that the online world gives people a way to escape from their insecurities and stresses of everyday life. They are able to become someone they're not, but someone they long to be, someone they live up to, or something they know that is unrealistic. This analysis is further supported through Zhao's explanation that 'the self is not something we are born with or something that is innate in us; instead it is something we acquire through interaction with others'. This further presents the idea that our online self is not only influenced by our thoughts, but from how others interact with us. How people begin to perceive us in the first place roots our emotions and thoughts. However interactivity is always happening through our life and will always be changing and adapting. The digital self allows us essentially upgrade our online identity by 'making it possible to re-tract an undesirable self and build a new one without resorting to physical relocation and social uprooting'. Zhao concludes by suggesting that 'our sense of self is based primarily on what we believe others think of us, rather than on what others actually think of us'. Media plays on our insecurities and exposes a form of beauty and an identity which we can never obtain, our feelings are altered and we become anxious to expose our natural self in fear of being judged and unliked, therefore the digital self becomes a way of only showing parts of ourselves which we are ok with others seeing.

This article was very interesting to understand how people mentally create two different identities, the offline and the online. My images plan to capture how media submerges and conceals our offline self in favour for the digital.