fragmentation of the online self
Online culture encourages young people to turn themselves into a product at an age when they’re only starting to discover who they are. When an audience becomes emotionally invested in a version of you that you outgrow, keeping the product you’ve made aligned with yourself becomes an impossible dilemma.
New York Times • Opinion | YouTube Gave Me Everything. Then I Grew Up.
Gen Zs reject the sterile, constrained online identities encouraged by older social platforms in favor of more customized forms of online expression.
Rex Woodbury • Back to the Future: Myspace and Gen Z Digital Identity
To paraphrase Marx, we might hunt for jobs on LinkedIn in the morning, fish for compliments on Instagram in the afternoon, criticize each other on Twitter after dinner, and be as lascivious as we like on Tinder in the late evening, without letting any of these identities define us... Nevertheless, something is lost in this fractionalization o... See more