By its nature, social media is about sharing, through which connections are formed between people. At least, at its fundamental level, this is true. It would be more accurate to say that connections are formed between accounts. These accounts are typically run by people, they are typically a direct representation of the person running them, but this is often not the case. Social media accounts could be brands, companies, fictional characters, pets or any range of non-human entities. They could also be entirely automated, for a myriad of reasons, from politically-driven Russian bots, to humour-based script bots.
How these accounts present themselves is based entirely on what they share with the rest of the world. Personally, I have a number of accounts for various functions.
Above is the Twitter account I use, in conjunction with this WordPress site, for my studies at Deakin. I share almost no personal information on there, instead focusing on communicating with other people in my unit and the unit faculty. At the end of my study, it is unlikely these accounts will see any use, so any connections made are fleeting.
All of my personal accounts are either set to private, or not under my full name. As this compartmentalisation is specifically in place to keep my private life, work life and studies separate, I will not be comparing my personal accounts to the accounts I use for this unit.
Instead, I will be looking toward my short-lived, now sparsely-active travel blog. Primarily, it documented my time backpacking through Europe, my time living in London and my time travelling home via North America. At the time, I had hoped to gain a following so I could possibly turn it into a career. I failed to network properly, but the beginnings of a personality were beginning to form.
I tried to find a balance between the natural, Australian irreverence, while still holding on to the wonder and awe that drove me to travelling in the first place. I hoped to provide something that other travel blogs I had seen weren’t providing.
As a solo traveller, I didn’t have anyone to take pictures of myself. It kept a level of anonymity to the account. While I wasn’t actively hiding my identity, especially as the followers were primarily friends and family from home, and a few people I met along the way, it did help me to keep things separate.
Of course, the primary use for the Instagram, Facebook and severely neglected Twitter account, were to draw attention to my blog.
On this blog, I let the persona I had built shine through. I was the quintessential Australian traveller. On a weekly basis, I put the effort into being someone that didn’t quite reflect myself. All the highs and none of the lows. There was one blog that I wrote early on, before I left Australia for the first time, pinpointing the reasons I was worried about leaving, but even that spun things in a positive light, shooting down every problem as being easily-solved.
While it is closer to my “authentic” self than my study-related accounts, my travel blog’s social media still presents a calculated, stage-managed self (Smith & Watson 2013, p 75). A representation of a brand. Someone I thought would be attractive to readers. More than that, it was someone I wanted to be. That desire to be more like the person I presented gave that persona a sincerity that gave the appearance of “true” authenticity, at least as far as anyone is truly authentic on social media.
Marshall wrote about the “public private self” (2010, ), and while he was writing about how social media works in relation to celebrities, the same can be said of any brand that has a singular face. It is a level just below the “public self”, which is a wholly corporatised version of the celebrity, for announcing upcoming projects, appearances and the like. The public private self on the other hand is a calculated view behind the curtain, producing a feeling of connection between a follower and the account’s owner, whether by sharing something about their life, especially things their audience can relate to, or responding to a follower’s question. This conveys a “sense of intimacy” (Smith & Watson 2013) that the public self does not, while holding enough back for the account owner’s privacy.
References
Marshall, PD 2010, ‘The promotion and presentation of the self: celebrity as marker of
presentational media’, Celebrity Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 35-48, Retrieved 26/04/2020, <https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy-f.deakin.edu.au/doi/full/10.1080/19392390903519057>
Smith, S and Watson, J 2014, ‘Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation’, in Poletti, A and Rak, J (eds.), Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, pp. 70-95
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