Social media gets the blame for the idea of the ‘curated self’ – the process of selectively sharing the bits of ourselves that we want other people to know while we hide the bits we don’t want others to know. Most of us don’t share selfies when we’re at home with the flu, but we reserve selfies for moments when we’re on holiday, or in front of a famous monument, times when we believe we’re looking our best. Some of us prefer not to be ‘selfie-people’, which, in itself, is a form of curation.
This phenomenon of the curated self has been around long before social media. Humans have always curated themselves. Whether that’s dampening our opinions in front of a group of people who disagree with us, or wearing certain clothes to ‘fit in’. Each choice we make in the way we present ourselves in public is a version of the curated self; it forms our reputation.
And, just as a daily look in the bathroom mirror teaches us about how we physically change – a new wrinkle or a sprouting hair that wasn’t there yesterday signals that we’re getting older – so too does the record of our digital selves. With every post, share, like, or love, we’re signalling to others what sort of person we are, and in the process, signalling to ourselves, too.
So what do we see when we look back at ourselves online? Our social feeds present back to us a version of ourselves, just like a mirror does. It tells us what we liked or didn’t like, and when. We see what we thought constitutes ‘looking our best’, and often, what we valued most at a particular time. We search it and reflect on it just as we interrogate our image in a mirror, searching for confirmation about who we think we are and checking it for surprises. But, unlike a physical mirror, the online mirror only reflects the stuff we want it to. There are no ‘overnight pimples’ in our social fields because we often don’t post the sorrow or hardship we face but didn’t want to share with anyone.
So perhaps ‘the curated self for others’ isn’t just a social media problem. Maybe it’s about the risk of curating ourselves for ourselves, every day. What effect does that have on us in the future? If I build an online reputation for being an artist, will I come to believe I am one? Is the opposite true? It seems that first, we shape our reputation, then our reputation may well shape us.