On the first day of class, Professor Hocutt asked the class about the relationship between media and identity, where the general response was that media can influence identity. Upon reading the keyword ‘identity,’ I’ve come to realize that not only can media influence identity, however in my own experience, media has the ability to restrict and reshape an individual’s own sense of identity. Speaking about media in a modern sense, it is inherently true that individuals can present their identities online, although media makes it easy to morph and curate new, or different identities than the original. Although these sub-versions of identity still exist as a branch of the original, these new versions of the identity mutilate and generally diminish an individual’s own perspective on their own identity. In class was discussed De Cart’s “I think, therefore I know,” meaning that the world is subjective to the people living in it. Continuously formulating a new identity, or attempting to morph a ‘good’ one online will only serve as a detriment to the individual themself, as they will never truly know what others think of them. Because the individual views everything from their own perception, it is safe to say that the attempts in curating the ‘ideal’ identity online only diminishes ‘true’ identity.
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Good use of Decartes in describing the issues you’re addressing in this post. But there are real questions about whether there is a “true self” or “true to self identity” lurking within one’s self, because only outside the subject/object dichotomy can an ideal identity exist. Everything else is subject to others’ objectivity and/or to our own subjective standards and ideas.