I like to think she’ll laugh at Wilde’s call to be herself afterward, as her personal avatar, though certainly tragic, is. Wilde’s (unconfirmed) irony seems to suggest that in a rapidly urban mass society, as he saw in the boom phase, anonymous crowds have the temptation to distinguish oneself by putting oneself in front of them as a signature: the essence of being is the essence of being, visibly presenting oneself in a private appearance. must manifest. But if everyone wants to be themselves in their own heart (the masses are always others as hell), each has no choice but to be himself without the temptation to usurp another personality.
When I first read this so-called Wilde phrase, I imagined a stage and a group of people playing empty chairs on it. Each chair was like a personality, and those who went after another in each round risked losing their own chair, as there would always be a chair missing from the people playing. Therefore, it is better to sit on our own, without separating our hips from it. In short, “be yourself” is a weak consolation, what often happens to us is not a challenge but a crusade. In fact, escaping the boring prison of the self and wanting to be someone else or someone else seems like a much more exciting adventure.
Be-Yourself later continued his advertising career: How many times have we heard slogans that are variations on the same theme. In fact, advertising always implicitly appeals to him, in a handy spin from possession to being (pardon the double e for emphasis), making one forget for a moment that any advertising moral imperative implied the purchase of the product or the making of the contract. advertised service. This argument is paradoxical to say the least: each of you buy all or most of my (identical) product to be (unique) yourself.
It ended up being turned into a self-help phrase. Advertising slogans like an exhausted castaway reach the beaches of the bookstore’s self-help section: Just do it, The experts in you, Redecorate your life, or There are things money can’t buy, possible titles of genre handbooks, if so, branding Nike, El Corte Ingles, IKEA, or Mastercard on them. It wasn’t because he put it.
Not only is it banal to pretend to be oneself (as if sameness were a treasure concealed by a layer of pressure that a pickaxe and shovel could release, as if there were no other selves always inclined to boycott it, as if it would boycott it). It is not possible to imagine a legitimately masochistic counter-self, or multiple selves invented for the situation that fills us, successively or simultaneously). It also suggests that whoever actively insists on being so is not really engaged in a difficult task of self-knowledge, but is in serious existential distress. The danger is not to be in the crowd, but to disappear. I remember Robin Williams’ character in Keeping Harry Apart (Woody Allen, 1997), out of focus, as if his existential crisis had caused him to be seen and blurred: he needs vital focus to make it clear. However, what actually happens to all of us is more likely to be a soft version of the pathology of another Allen character, Zelig (1983); accepted. The struggle for distinction always entails the need for dialectical integration.
Inspired by the motto “be yourself”, in short, he is a miserable shadow looking for the author of his own life, but how many fall under his spell, as if the phrase came from a handbook. As with an oracle and runaway pineal gland, they decide to inject more personality and an untransferable self into their lives through the overproduction of their hormones. As a self-help expression, be yourself seems like a call to “sincerity” and an antidote to hypocrisy, a self-defense and an incentive to give up imitation or imitation. But how so many beings decided to be themselves, how the desire for originality was standardized. There is nothing more homogenizing than when they all search desperately for themselves as in a covered market, wandering around the shelves or stalls in search of the precious sign of the self.
proud in networks
The promotion of personality has been associated first with the diversification of the goods and services industry, and then with customization and DIY (do-it-yourself) as a necessity: Being yourself is mentally wandering the aisles of an IKEA. Buying decisions and being decisions (be yourself!) become equivalent, all perfectly packaged and ready to assemble.
The digital universe has only accelerated the celebration of the entire party of separation, of being everyone’s own at all costs. The unique thing about social networks is that we need to not only be proud of who we are, but also share, because not sharing it would be like not being it. To be is to share.
Previously, the sociopathy of being-self manifested itself in public spaces (streets, parties, demonstrations, demonstrations, assemblies) by displaying signs of this distinction within the reach of the audience’s gaze only. Of course, celebrities have succeeded in producing this effect in the media documenting their passage through these public spaces with photos or videos, or capturing them in private spaces (mansions as Hola reports). This stance has now been democratized on social networks, as everyone’s profiles are well outlined on many of them, regularly feeding them bites of their own that they share with others.
But be careful: This way “sharing” has partially emptied its meaning. It will be necessary to remember that sharing, in a sense, means giving up a piece. To share a sandwich is to give up part of it (company comes from cum panem etymologically, from sharing bread), to share a room at home when a sibling or visitor arrives, to be more companionable, but also to be more uncomfortable. But sharing on networks does not imply any tangible waiver, any discomfort, any deprivation. The magic is that the advice to “share” from social networks (Facebook as a model) is colored by this generosity, the distance that sharing only has what we give up when we share something: we were truly convinced we did it. An altruistic property transfer by sharing it on your network. Facebook has made it possible for the private things we share to be perceived as something tangible, material that we give generously to the commons. And back. He was a kind of stingy who didn’t share on the net, laughing and pecking among others’ donations, but selfishly splitting his share: what’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine alone.
Another difference compared to the past tenses is the feedback of the posture in the form of mutual applause. Not only do we share how we are ourselves, but we also make fun of others themselves in hopes of reciprocation. There is an Asaf Hanukkah illustration called Likecoholic that shows a man sitting next to his desktop computer. Behind the screen comes a red wire that one arm sticks into his vein, seemingly in ecstasy with his eyes closed and head thrown back. Numerous thumbs come out of his mouth, and many more fall lightly around him like scattering, thumbs-up hands protruding from his open mouth, and emanations of selfish satisfaction. On display, his Facebook page.
There is another illustration showing Gepetto with Pinocchio in his arms, as they were designed by the Disney factory in the classic movie. They take a selfie, and the stick is Pinocchio’s own nose, telescopically extended by the power of lies. Documenting one’s own life, even in trivialities or nonsense, does not assume that vital “spontaneity” comes to the fore: we not only set the scene and choose locations for photography and video, but what do we do with things we don’t share? Don’t we consider it sendable? Overlook, clumsiness, anger, humiliation, bitter arguments, failures, millions of little daily events in which we are perpetrators of frauds or suffer in our bodies, plus we cannot sweeten and stage in a proud light. Doesn’t life and self-being belong to us as much as the other? (Fake) News Feed.
So all the intimacy on the nets call to find yourself and then share seems to be Zuckerberg’s earthly gospel (literally, a mountain of sugar or phrases to frame: “don’t let anyone tell you to change who you are” or “choose hope over fear” takes courage” or “our mission is to give people the power to share and make the world a more open and connected place”), all of which is really half the story, the side of the bright road.
Each of them has breakfast with sugar selves on the walls of their friends while browsing on their mobile phone or tablet and offers their own candy on their walls, which is like a cotton candy of digital loves, a house with a wall. Chocolate and caramel, where Hansel and Gretel guide their reckless steps.
*Raúl Rodríguez Ferrándiz is Professor in the Department of Communication and Social Psychology at the University of Alicante.