Self-reflection is typically an activity I have difficulty with. Like Liz Lemon’s annual self-evaluation on 30 rock claiming her only flaw is having too much humility, I have a difficult time stepping back and looking at the way I am represented. Though it is part of our human nature to pay attention to how people perceive oneself and how we portray ourselves, whether these are accurate portrayals or not, there is something unnatural about going back and looking across social media platforms and assessing my own representation. My edentity surely differs from my identity, but looking at my edentity across online mediums complicates the two categories and adds more than just two dimensions to edentity or identity.
I have a presence on instagram, facebook, email, and linkedin. All of my edentities across these four platforms function in very different ways. My instagram account mainly functions as a photo journal of overly filtered landscapes and lo-fi flooded plates of food . While I don’t post these things to facebook, or post much on facebook in general, my profile pictures are just recreations of sceneries that look just like my instagram, yet populated.
I rarely use Facebook to write on people’s walls or post statuses, but my representation on Facebook, though inactive, is very much so revealing. My edentity on Facebook is not in the form of the written, but through photos. I think that as far as a social media platform can go, my Facebook is representative of my life. It shows my friends, my school, my home; my Facebook is everything that I want people to see.
Contrastingly, my email and linkedin are much more professional representations of myself. Though my Facebook is not inappropriate, it is not what I would want an employer to view before my linkedin or before they read an email of mine. I use email and linkedin to communicate with professors and potential employers. These two platforms, in the past, I have not viewed as extensions of social media. This may be due to the frequency in which I find myself checking them, so that they have become removed from leisure activities, which is what I normally view my social media applications as. These two are a part of my life on more than a daily basis, so they function as an extension of me, rather than of my social media presence.
When taking into account my edentity, I see consistency across my platforms, to some extent. I am not a completely different person across these sites, but I do use them for different functions, which in turn, skews each edentity. I think that my edentities are reflective of my identity in different situations. For example, I wouldn’t order a glass of wine during a meeting with my boss, but I would during lunch with a friend. Our identities, to some extent, change to suit different occasions just as our edentities change to fit different platforms.
I have a presence on instagram, facebook, email, and linkedin. All of my edentities across these four platforms function in very different ways. My instagram account mainly functions as a photo journal of overly filtered landscapes and lo-fi flooded plates of food . While I don’t post these things to facebook, or post much on facebook in general, my profile pictures are just recreations of sceneries that look just like my instagram, yet populated.
I rarely use Facebook to write on people’s walls or post statuses, but my representation on Facebook, though inactive, is very much so revealing. My edentity on Facebook is not in the form of the written, but through photos. I think that as far as a social media platform can go, my Facebook is representative of my life. It shows my friends, my school, my home; my Facebook is everything that I want people to see.
Contrastingly, my email and linkedin are much more professional representations of myself. Though my Facebook is not inappropriate, it is not what I would want an employer to view before my linkedin or before they read an email of mine. I use email and linkedin to communicate with professors and potential employers. These two platforms, in the past, I have not viewed as extensions of social media. This may be due to the frequency in which I find myself checking them, so that they have become removed from leisure activities, which is what I normally view my social media applications as. These two are a part of my life on more than a daily basis, so they function as an extension of me, rather than of my social media presence.
When taking into account my edentity, I see consistency across my platforms, to some extent. I am not a completely different person across these sites, but I do use them for different functions, which in turn, skews each edentity. I think that my edentities are reflective of my identity in different situations. For example, I wouldn’t order a glass of wine during a meeting with my boss, but I would during lunch with a friend. Our identities, to some extent, change to suit different occasions just as our edentities change to fit different platforms.