Your Identity!
Our identity construction is more important than ever in this age of social media.
The world is pushing people to the point of losing their identity, even if they have not lost it yet. Identity loss puts you in a situation where you are not able to appreciate who you are and therefore, you’d always be walking in people’s shadows.
Social media has exacerbated the issue of identity defects. Many people now have two identities, the “real self” and the “online self”. All these are constructed differently by the same person. However, what we fail to recognise is that they are all complementary and whatever people see whether it’s your real self or the online self, they are likely not to differentiate any of these “selves”.
The youth are now consumed in creating their “lives” online without recourse to the fact that the image they think they are portraying to the outside is the same image they will be judged when people see them in their “offline self”, regardless of how you want to explain and differentiate your two “selves”.
Our identity construction is more important than ever in this age of social media. Thus, whatever face you show to the world on social media is what is going to be used to rate you or assess you. In this vein, what you don’t want to do in “real life” as it’s predominantly called, don’t do it in “virtual life”.
Employers who want to hire you would probably peruse your online activity and can readily form a first impression about you even before they meet you. In fact, because of the online first impression, they are either going to invite you or not. Similarly, investors would also likely look up at an entrepreneur’s activity online to ascertain whether they should invest their money into that business.
Finally, I’d implore you to be extra vigilant about your online activity because it can make or break you.
