Is Identity a Performance?

Is social media making us all play up to the camera?

In an age of surveillance, whether it is through the new A.I. facial recognition tools used at self-checkouts, to the TikToks we post, our identity is on full display for all to see. Influencers reap the monetary gain for putting your identity on show but what about the rest of us, in the digital age are we all performing our identity?

Patrick Fagan, a consumer psychologist, at the London College of Fashion who has published peer-reviewed papers on topics ranging from price psychology to Facebook psychology, explains, “Identity is a perception of the self – how one sees oneself, including through the lens of other people. In part it’s automatic, resulting from consistent patterns of behaviour and cultural influences; and in part, it’s deliberately constructed. There are two types of identity, personal and group identity, but both are driven by the need for self-esteem (feeling that one has belonging and competence).”

For a differing take, we also spoke to Dr. Marianne Trent, a qualified clinical psychologist and Host of The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. She explains, “I see identity being our internal narrative for how we live our lives which have been shaped by our upbringing, learning experiences and those around us.”

So if identity is how we see ourselves and how others perceive us, is the notion that we are performing our identity that outrageous?

Fagan explains, “Yes, people perform identity to an extent. They construct how they want to be seen by other people, and this might not always reflect their true thoughts, feelings, or behaviours.”

“For example, people might post something about a social cause online, but not take any real action towards it. However, this ‘performance’ is still driven by factors not entirely within our control (e.g. ‘slacktivism’ online might be a performance but it’s driven by the emotional need to fit in), and there are many ways in which identity is not deliberately performed (e.g., demographics, body language, hardwired predispositions).”

Trent adds to this, “I believe that we have different facets of our identity, or schemas if you like, that at different times, around a variety of people, can mean some of our traits may be more or less pronounced. Sometimes it can feel effortful to maintain certain ways of displaying our identity. To avoid burnout it is important that we have people around us whom we can truly just be ourselves around.”

‘Slacktivism’, caused by the endlessly growing factor of social media, has half of the population online and half of these people with their account settings on public. One quick scroll can give you insight not only into someone's tastes and lifestyle, but who they are, or who they want you to think they are. Fagan explains, “People are performing an identity more thanks to social media. Jean Twenge has shown how narcissism levels have increased over time, experimentally pointing to social media as the cause.”

“It is fracturing identity, leading to anxiety and poor self-esteem (The Anxious Generation looks like a good new book on this). This will just get compounded by immersive tech like AR, VR, and the Metaverse, as people become more consumed by their fake digital selves. There is a lot of research on the Proteus Effect – people become, in the real world, like their digital avatars.”

With camera settings available to morph your face a digital identity can be incredibly separate from your real-world one but as Fagan says this blurring of the line is leading to real-world effects. Ágnes Zsila & Marc Eric S. Reyes's work ‘Pros & cons: impacts of Social Media on Mental Health’ published in 2023, set out how the recent boom in social media use affects us. The conclusions finding that the quality of our social media use matters. If we use it to connect with others and share positive experiences, it can make us feel better, particularly when looked in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trent adds to this, ”I think that the COVID-19 pandemic moved mountains in terms of acceptance and self-expression and that it created an ideal timeframe for people to really think about what brings them joy, and conversely what detracts from their joyful cup. Sometimes these shifts have included changes around identity and how to show up.”

But as the physical and digital become increasingly blurred is only using social media for positive experiences attainable? Identity is no longer a private construction and I would argue identity as a performance is an accurate description of where we find ourselves in the modern world we live in.