In my understanding of postmodernism, it's a ideal/belief that as a society we can create/change our personas to fit into almost any situation that we're in. This could be done artistically or even through social media, which has been more predominant in recent years. By analyzing social media with postmodernism, there are sites and apps that create a connection between the two topics. Sites/Apps like Twitter and Instagram, let users show a very small portion of their lives to the world, making them seem more interesting than what they appear to be in real life through tweets and photos. Sites like Facebook highly discouraged users to pretend to be someone else other than their true selves, but it doesn't stop people from creating fake profiles and trying to "catfish" other users. The term "catfish" literally means to create fake identities online (mostly on Facebook) and try to bait users into false relationships either for love, money or other ulterior motives.
Sherry Turkle, who wrote in chapter 7 "Aspects of Life" in her book Life on Screen, gives examples of how postmodernism has affected young adults lives through the internet, using chat rooms and virtual spaces. These young adults in some cases, have been able to portray themselves as maybe more outgoing, more of a leader, more of a parent figure compared to their everyday lives offline. Turkle says that "the internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life." (Turkle 180). On the MTV show "Catfish", two guys named Nev and Max read emails from people who have been in conversations/relationships with users who might've been pretending to be people they are not. They eventually meet up with these people to try and find out if these users are who they say they are. Most of the time they're not and there have been cases where people don't feel like they belong in their social setting so they find comfort online by pretending to be someone. This gives them a fresh start on who they really want to be, this could mean being more attractive, outgoing, etc. George Ritzer, who is an American sociologist and teaching professor also analyzed the internet in a postmodernist way. Ritzer said that "An interesting idea in this context is the strength of the weak. In this case, the weak are the individual users of the Internet and social networking sites. Their strength comes from the fact that their voices, while weak individually, the become powerful when they are combined." With Catfish, people have claimed that they have found a confidence online rather than offline and sometimes they have used that ability to be mean and cruel to others, even have lied and asked for money for many different reasons. In the terms of creating an identity online, I believe it should be in the purest sense by adhering to rules and not lying to others. However, if there needs to be change in an identity situation online, then it needs to be parallel to the social setting offline.
Works Cited
Ritzer, “The Internet Through a Postmodern Lens” http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/11/19/the-internet-through-a-postmodern-lens/
Turkle, Sherry, “Aspects of the Self” Chapter 7. Life on the Screen, Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, 1997. (PDF)
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