Online Personas

An exploration of the online "exo-self."

When social media was first introduced, it was promoted as a technology that would connect the world. MySpace was going to let us discover friends on the other side of the planet, while Facebook was going to reconnect us with estranged friends and family who didn’t live near us. Twitter was a chance for everyone to share thoughts with everyone else, and the funniest, most insightful, most engaging comments would catch fire and be sent around the entire internet. When social media was first introduced, the assumption was that the personalities that occupied online spaces and communities would be consistent with people’s real life personas.

That turned out to be an incorrect assumption, and I don’t think anyone anticipated the amount of disassociation that would take place between people’s online and offline activity.

At first it seemed attributable to the anonymity of the internet; people could hide behind an alias or a username that allowed them to exist in the world independent of their online behavior, allowing them to behave poorly online but otherwise keep their online presence separate from their real lives. But in recent years, especially with the rise of video messages and influencer culture, I’d argue that the “exo-self” contemplated in the prompt is an artifact of the previous internet age, back when maintaining separate personas online and offline was the preferred mode of discourse.

I believe we’ve reached a new era of the internet, where many are emboldened and even encouraged to maintain a single persona. Although I think there’s a fair argument to be made about which is dominant; whether more people are authentically their offline selves while online, or whether more people allow their offline lives to become what the online persona is trying to portray.

The issue of which persona is dominant and the extent to which it influences other areas of a person’s life is largely an individual one. There are plenty of people who occupy online communities as their authentic selves; their online presence an extension of the person they are offline. Yet there are also plenty of examples of people who have created an online persona for themselves and then seek to reorient their lives around the fiction that they’ve created for strangers on the internet. And I’d argue that the vast majority of people are somewhere between the two extremes, where they seek to present an idealized version of themselves online, whatever that may mean to them.

On the one hand, the idea of exploring a personality outside of oneself is well established as a thing that humans aspire toward. Many humans aspire to be actors or writers, for whom it is a professional calling to embody the lives of others, if only for a time. Many people find themselves wanting a different friend group when starting at a new school, or a “fresh start” after a significant life event. It’s a human desire to want to mold our sense of self, but there’s a very real question of whose benefit that sense of self is being restructured for, and at what cost.

Ultimately, I think we owe it to ourselves to be discerning about these types of things. Approaching them from a singular perspective or with blanket assumptions without an evaluative process and/or making allowances for people’s individual circumstances would be a mistake, because it’s not a “one size fits all” situation.

Authentic relationships and positive effects can be found online. There is certainly no shortage of stories about people who have no real-world connections to their interests, but found a sense of belonging and community through online connections. And those stories have both good and bad endings; for every person who found an online tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) group after not being able to find anyone in their tiny hometown interested in playing with them, there’s also a story of a person who found an online community that indulged and incubated their most paranoid, toxic thoughts.

Human beings have a remarkable capacity for good, perhaps rivaled only by their remarkable capacity to harm. The existence of online communities hasn’t so much changed that fact as given us a new aspect of it to explore. Whether we choose to have it be a positive aspect of our sense of self, or a distortion of who we are largely depends on the individual, their circumstances, and their choices.

For those who use it to positive ends, the “exo-self” found through online engagement can be an incredible way to reach a “chosen family” of people from around the world that you might not otherwise have ever met.

For those who use it for selfish or damaging ends, the “exo-self” found through online engagement might just be one of the most toxic and self-destructive things we can do to ourselves.

Like so many things, who we are when we’re online has the possibility to make us either far better or far worse.

---

Word Count: 822

Prompt: Exo-Self - Our Online Presence, Relationships, and Reality. Many people now live a significant part of their lives online, creating digital extensions of themselves, an “exo-self.” Through social media platforms and increasingly through AI interactions, these identities shape how we present ourselves and connect with others. Does this exo-self enhance human connection and self-expression, or does it distance us from authentic relationships and lived reality? To what extent does our online presence reflect who we truly are and how might it reshape us in return? In your response, explore whether the exo-self is ultimately a positive extension of human possibility or a distortion of it. You may also propose ways to evaluate whether an online presence is healthy, authentic, or harmful.

Written for: "Grill a Christian"