Pseudonyms Lets You Practice Agency
“in this version though, a lot of your story is written by others. You write your autofiction about yourself and others write their fictions about you, often anonymously, on Substacks, subreddits, messageboards like Lolcow, on Twitter and Instagram and podcasts too, and this makes things different from what has come before. The lives of these perso
... See moreWhat is the % difference between IRL Michael and the online caricature of Michael Dean? Is it 1%, 5%, 20%? Can I even know that? In some ways, could the online self be more real than the IRL self? Could it be the frontier where I test and grow into facets of my identity?
On one hand, I know the self is a made-up concept of the mind, that identity should be kept small, and that trying to pin myself down usually does more harm than good. On the other hand, when I sit down to write, I feel like every sentence disproves this
Molly Mielke • (self) concept
As the American sociologist Charles Cooley put it: “I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am.” He dubbed this phenomenon “the looking glass self,” and the evidence for it is diverse, encompassing the everyday experience of seeing ourselves through imagined eyes in social situations (the spotlight effec
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