Self-Construction in a New World

In the previous article in this series, we proposed Identity Reinforcement as the fundamental cause behind most of what we do –and the reason for Facebook’s addictive power and overwhelming success. Throughout their lives, people try to build and reinforce a certain identity. This need for reinforcement conditions us to favor information that confirms our worldview, and social interaction in which our identity is approved. What Facebook does is that it gives its users a physical place for displaying their persona and receiving positive social feedback on themselves. The idea is not particularly new, but it’s an incredibly powerful one, and FB implements it well.

Yet, not every user is fully satisfied with Facebook’s impact on their time and social lives. Besides the usual critics such as FB being a time waster, lacking privacy options in the release of personal contents, etc., an interesting comment that I keep hearing is that social interaction on Facebook feels empty, pointless –fake, even. 

The thing is, identity construction through Facebook is far from being actually fulfilling. At the moment, the social feedback is mostly mere button clicking, hardly involving any sort of emotional engagement on the part of those providing it. It does not fully play its role as an identity reinforcer.

But let’s look at the identity construction process itself. It is based on old-school identity components (photo, relationship status, age, job/school & city –in order of importance) as well as something slightly more novel: the display of your tastes in content consumption. The fields that Zuck has chosen as representative of your personality are primarily your favorite music, movies, books, games, and TV shows. Surprisingly there’s no “favorite websites” field –possibly because it could drive traffic away from FB.

And that’s it: according to your profile you are what content you consume, to a large extent. And as a matter of fact, the other essential place of identity construction and social feedback on FB, the wall, is more and more used for content sharing as well –each link posted being another display of who you are, or rather, of who you want others to think you are.

Content consumption has gotten social. And beyond that, identity has become content-based.

Content consumption has gotten social. And beyond that, identity has become content-based.

I think that’s a fascinating shift of identity construction paradigm. Think about it. Way back in traditional societies –basically up until the Industrial Revolution–, people had very little margin for identity construction. It was pretty much an unknown concept. You were born who you would always be. Your identity was defined by your environment, by the group to which you belonged, often as narrow as a single family. Society was thus structured in castes, and no social mobility was allowed. Your entire life was in your genes.

Then everything changed. As science and technology moved forward and industrial production took off, the scope of what was possible to do and own for both individuals and for humanity as a whole suddenly exploded. As a result, the old social hierarchies were swept off, and society started to reorganize itself around the chain of material production and consumption. Because money was the nervous system of it all, people’s identity came to be defined by the wealth category to which they belonged, and this new identity was socially displayed through material consumption. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed the final stage of the shift from the old identity paradigm to the new one, consecrated by an advertising-based culture. People were then defined by what they owned, and social interaction was centered on material consumption.

Until everything changed again. As a new shift in technological affordances brought cheap, massive information consumption at the reach of everyone, our self-definition references blurred and morphed. Though a lot of us still live inside the identity paradigm of the consumption society, younger people today tend to think differently of themselves. As John Seely Brown nicely put it (former director of PARC: A Xerox Company):

“Today’s kids are fundamentally different than yesterday’s kids because yesterday we tended to define ourselves by what we wore, what we owned [..] We defined ourselves by material assets. Today, the born digital kids tend to think of themselves as what they create, share, and –crucially– what others build on.”

 John Seely Brown

With the explosion of free and easy access to cultural content, taking place primarily online, information consumption became a huge component of our personas and our social interaction. We have now gone from an industrial civilization to an information-based civilization. A company like Apple, providing the very fuel of this society in the form of the devices on which to consume and produce content, recently reached a market capitalization of a similar order to that of oil companies of the previous century, at the third spot with $296B, right behind PetroChina ($303B) and Exxon Mobil ($369B).

And this paradigm shift is why your Facebook page looks like a catalogue of your tastes in content consumption. That was self-construction in the 2000s. Taste display, and weak, button-clicking-based positive social feedback on that display.

But we’re not in the 2000s anymore, and self-construction in the 2010s might not look like a Facebook page. As said earlier, FB does not quite make the cut as the ultimate identity construction tool –mostly because social feedback on FB doesn’t convey much implication on both parts. It’s all 3-word-comments and like-button-clicks –on posts that did not engage much of the poster’s persona to begin with. 

I think that in the near future some platforms might try to leverage identity construction of another order of magnitude entirely. Actually fulfilling display and feedback. But to that effect, we would need to get past FB’s superficiality. Here’s what I propose.

In the near future some platforms might try to leverage identity construction of another order of magnitude entirely. Actually fulfilling display and feedback. But to that effect, we would need to get past FB’s superficiality.

Identity Construction Through Creative Projects 

What if your activity on social networks moved away from trivial, taste-display-related pursuits, on to what really matters for you –who you want to become and what you want to achieve?  I propose strong identity building through socialized work on personal projects. As a matter of fact, personal projects turned social are a much more enjoyable and addictive form of drug than social entertainment, though based on the same sort of cognitive reinforcement.

The base idea is to move beyond mere passive content consumption on to content creation –a process mixing external consumption, personal engagement, and strong social feedback. How much stronger is your connection to a displayed persona based on things you created or things you achieved, compared to one made of things you found and liked? How much more intense the feedback when you get to exchange with like-minded creators on key point of your displayed identity? A project can be basically anything: art, tech, ideas, entertainment, pretty much any endeavor to create a consumable content.

The dynamics at work in social networks can be used to help people start and develop “creative projects” in a wonderful way. Imagine a place where users would display a project-based identity on which to receive strong social feedback, full of ideas and personal engagement –as opposed to FB’s consumption-based identity. 

Imagine a place where users would display a project-based identity on which to receive strong social feedback, full of ideas and personal engagement –as opposed to FB’s consumption-based identity.

Have you ever been part of an online creative community? Ever felt frustrated about them? Ever wondered what it would look like if it were structured as a social network? The problem with today’s creative communities is that they weren’t built with identity reinforcement in mind. And it’s pretty much what prevents them from having the massive appeal that FB has. Not the fact that “most people can’t create” –ability is a very superficial problem, turns out. Everyone can, they just don’t know it yet. And I believe most people *want* to create, if only because it’s kind of cool —that’s really all that matters.

Take deviantART for instance. Or Youtube. Flickr, or Myspace. The first problem of all is popularity-based content propagation. I’ve covered that one in an earlier post. Feedback is hardly correlated to the quality and relevance of what you produce.

And then there’s the problem of asymmetrical social interaction –or worse: real-life-based. No interaction on these sites is in the least meaningful or constructive. It’s mostly useless for identity building, and only retains a slight addictive factor. The most common form of feedback a creative person will get will be 3-words comments from fans that very partially “get it”. The social feedback on these platforms can never be part of the creation process. The only thing you can learn from this twittering, is an understanding of what the public at large likes. Are you confronted with an inspiration problem or a technical problem? You’ll have to find the answer by yourself.

Yet merit-based content propagation as well as constructive, fulfilling social interaction do exist on some places of the web. At a very small scale, and in a quite poorly optimized fashion. In a quantity of fields, a number of creative forums led by a small charismatic elite have been prospering since the early 2000s –and have changed thousands of lives throughout the world, by getting motivated newbies swept off their feet into a personal development tornado that allowed them to build creative, strong, fulfilling identities for themselves. And, as a side-note, a nice portfolio.

Now to make it scalable. It’s but a matter of time until the next generation of social networks is out there, and with it, the next paradigm shift in identity building. Emerging technologies are once again on the edge of disrupting everything you think you know about self-construction, social interaction, and human culture. For the better…

Follow François Chollet on Twitter (@fchollet)