It was just last weekend when I saw the TV show known as Criminal Minds. This particular episode was about a man who had been creating many identities for himself and defrauding wealthy couples. His MO was to sleep with the wife, have the wife introduce him to the husband, swindle the wealthy couple out of a large sum, and then kill the husband. This man had done this in multiple city with multiple couples in each city, and the detectives were only able to catch this near-perfect criminal because of the way he started breaking down and getting “sloppy”. This resulted from a process known as “identity fracturing” (read more about multiple personality disorder here); all of these identities that he had created for himself—despite having the same man behind them—had led him to start blending fictitious traitss with real qualities.
As much as I’d love to delve further into the criminal psychology of this character’s patterns, I thought it would be better to bring it home. It has become clear to me that we have all been fracturing our identities more than past generations. If you haven’t already guessed, I believe this is almost entirely attributed to technology—more specifically social media.
In considering my own online presence, I went to the most visual and surface-level analysis first: my home screen. In the “Social” applications folder on my smartphone, it appears that I have nineteen photo-sharing, messaging, and social media apps. What was even scarier is that, on most of these apps, I am different people! Combined, my followers, friends, message recipients, etc. experience almost twenty different Aarons! This is in addition to the multiple selves I have in real life. (Here is a blog that helped me consider this personality division on social media.) Is this okay?
Even though there is certainly overlap between many of the online and web personas I have created, I wanted to better understand what part of myself I was channeling through each outlet. With this blog as an important one of those twenty different selves, I was fairly confident that secrets had a fair amount to do with it. The secrets I kept in order to make the main voice of that outlet, whichever one
of the many it was, m
ore prominent and unique were exactly what gained me followers and likes. For example, taking the lot of emotional baggage I have to Twitter would be totally damaging to the comedic presence I have established on it. Taking the more obscene thoughts I have to the oh-so-monitored Facebook would be catastrophic to my superiors’ perceptions of me later on down the road during, say, a job application.
Once again, I stress that I have almost twenty of these personalities. In the same episode of Criminal Minds, it was noted that the CIA assigns approximately two or three aliases/false identities to its operatives. The number is very intentional so as to prevent the fracturing that occurred to the serial scammer and killer in this Criminal Minds episode from happening to those responsible for this nation’s security. Can we fracture healthily? The most trivial question to ask is: are losing followers on each of our social media outlets by keeping secrets to convey a particular personality on each? The much more important question to ask is: are we losing a part of our actual self and interpersonal relationships in real life at too fast of a rate to recover?
I want to explore this further, so I’m going to follow up on this topic in a couple of posts. In the meantime, let this be some food for thought regarding your use of technology as an enabler to convey a more filtered, refined you. I know I will be doing the same.
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