Tara Isabella Burton explores personal identity, public identity, and the ways living a public live on social media – publicy, in my dogma – can impart a duality of the self:
Playing a public role on social media, presenting ourselves as a “character” (the “fun one,” the workaholic, the gleeful bohemian, the “good friend,” the liberal do-gooder, and so forth), is to commit to being that person in the social sphere: to enter into an informal contract with those that witness us to “be that person.” It’s an argument similar to that of the Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman, who understood the self as a constant performer, narrating and navigating its selfhood in direct response to its audience. But Ricoeur’s “audience,” as it were, goes beyond the horizontal — the social present — and into the realm of the literary and the mythic. We are creating ourselves not merely “before” others but also “before” the cultural and historical characters we want to be and “before” an imagined future audience: part of a (perhaps unconscious) chain of discourse that links us, in terms of our significance, to an Achilles or an Arthur.
While Goffman allows for a “backstage” — a place where we can be ourselves without theatrical presentation — [20th century philosopher Paul] Ricoeur’s model allows for no such place. There is nowhere beyond language and narrative, and so there is nowhere we are not in dialogue with the stories that have shaped and will continue to shape our self-understanding. For Ricoeur, ethics lies in internal consistency — in “keeping one’s word” in future encounters. So our performances publicly may help us shape who we are privately as well.
Our narrative identities and their refiguring power to shape both our own personal stories and the stories of others are integral to our ability to better ourselves: which is to say, to create versions of ourselves more in line with the values we hold, and the people we most want to be. If sin, for Saint Augustine as for a long line of theologians and philosophers alike, lies in the chasm between who we are and who we want to be, self-improvement can be a matter of closing of that gap in the successful enactment of the narratives that shape us.
Are we who we say we are?
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153557694477
