On Identity
On Social Media, Identity, and Quantifying the Unquantifiable.
Highlights
We’re still in the early days of social media. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram are all less than 20 years old.
Big picture, this is just the beginning of social media. And it’s interesting to see the changes in how we’ve been using it since the early days.
The question is how social media culture will continue to evolve in the future to suit our revealed preferences.
In the beginning, Facebook culture was very different. Today, we’re reeling from its unintended consequences.
We’ve institutionalized identity. We’ve outsourced trust to external institutions to tell us the truth about ourselves. This is not just found in social media, but in universities, and net-worth figures.
But these aren’t always accurate. The truth is we can’t accurately quantify the subjective. That won’t stop us from trying, though.
For example, identity or self-worth (subjective) can’t be accurately measured by numbers. But we try to accomplish that with social media.
As humans, we tend to exist through the eyes of others. This is an idea discussed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. This is why many of us turn to external sources of truth.
Perhaps a new social media culture is evolving. One centered around authenticity and failure instead of polished highlights. We see this culture with memes and TikTok. Could this be the next step? How long could it be before then?
Somewhat Related Concepts
Availability Heuristic: a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic. (stolen definition)
Paired Metrics: be careful when associating two variables. The relationship isn’t always linear. For example: customer touch points and sales. Just because touch points go up, doesn’t mean sales will.
Resources and People
Nat Eliason -> I just discovered the Made You Think Podcast which is amazing. The Sovereign Individual is my favorite episode so far.
Cal Newport -> Digital Minimalism has a great framework for thinking about our relationship with social media.
Existentialism -> a unifying theme for the subjects we’re trying to explore.