The looking glass self
In the age of social media, people increasingly get to
have the sense of authorship over how they present themselves to the world, you’r
carefully curated instagram feed, your facebook profile pictures, these are
ways in which you essentially get to dictate, you get to construct the way that
other people perceive you, and this raises all kinds of questions about the
fluidity of our identity about how we interface with other minds and other people
and it raises all kinds of questions about authenticity, authentic exchanges.
Who m I? and so the philosopher by the last name of Cooley, he wrote about the
looking glass self theory and basically what he said is that we come to be
through the interactions that we have with other people, by making models of
the other person’s mind. In other words, he says:”I’m not who I think I’m, I’m
not who you think I’m, I’m who I think you think I’m”. In other words, we make renderings
of what other people think of us and actually play the role of becoming we
think they think we are, but in the end we never actually get to know other people’s
minds, all we get to know is the modeling of their modeling of us.
So in the end of the day, we live inside a construct of our own making. I guess perhaps what we should do is come clean about this fact and stop asking questions about authenticity in the ways that we present ourselves artfully on social media and instead accept the fact that identity is a fluid act of improvisation and that the self is not a solid thing and never has been. Now again,
I’m not who I think I’m, I’m not who you think I’m, I’m who I think you think I’m. Wrap you head around that one
Jason Silva - shots of awe
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