She likes your Instagram story. You show your friends his profile picture to confirm he’s cute. The group of sorority girls spends 20 minutes at bance taking pictures with a cheap Canon camera. 

Digital communication and social media platforms are the validators of in-person interactions. You don’t really know how the date went until you receive the “hey” text two hours later; a following-to-followers ratio can make or break your social reputation.

Let’s speed-run some critical theory real quick. Linguist Jacques Derrida theorized that in a text each word is dependent on the others in a sentence to derive meaning. Feminist author Judith Butler claimed identity is performed through behaviors. 

By this logic, one’s performance of identity is dependent on others’ performances of their identities. 

And if the performance of everyone’s identity is filtered through and validated by digital technology, then wouldn’t that make our identities … something other than human?

Donna Haraway claimed the human race was now posthuman, a cyborg, a “hybrid of machine and organism.” And it increasingly feels like “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”

Hans-Georg Moeller, researcher of Social and Political Thought at the University of Macau, and Paul D’Ambrosio, professor of Chinese

Friends pose for a photo at a party. (Courtesy of Alexander Fako)

philosophy at East China Normal University, coined the term “Profilicity” in their book, “You and Your Profile,” to define this phenomenon: “Profilicity means assuming identity through public accounts of oneself.” 

In other words, you assume your identity not through going to an apartment party on Unofficial, but by posting a group picture of you and your friends at that party two days later on your Instagram story with the caption, “We’re so back!!”

But who are you posting these images to? Moeller and D’Ambrosio argue that social media users post to the “General Peer,” an abstract audience of everyone outside their close friends and family. 

I disagree. And something tells me I have more experience posting on Instagram than a couple of (genius) college professors. Moeller and D’Ambrosio theorize that profilic identity depends on being seen as being seen; a social validation feedback loop of second-order observation. This is correct.

However, users post on social media with quite specific audiences in mind. In a very Freudian fashion, a user may post a picture of themselves on the beach because they look attractive and are followed by a few people they are sexually interested in. If a user is really smart, they may use a song in a post that they know their crush listens to — playing chess, not checkers.

Users carefully curate and construct social media profiles brick-by-brick. It is not uncommon for former high school classmates to unfollow others to improve their “ratio.” Pictures of exes will disappear within minutes of breaking up. The profile “is an obviously selected and edited form of self-presentation.” 

If your “Proof of life” Instagram post is set to the tune of “It Never Rains in Southern California,” then perhaps you’ll receive compliments from friends on your song choice. You are then “hailed” by this identity as someone with niche music taste, as “knowing who we are involves knowing how others see us.” 

Nowadays, these compliments are filtered through TikTok comments, Instagram reposts and, for the boomers out there, Facebook Mom Groups. 

Of course, there is always the guy with the grey avatar Instagram “pfp.” Or the person who renounces social media altogether. Do they disprove the notion that everyone’s social media presence, and therefore identity, is performative?

Not at all. Those who don’t conform to the typical presentations of self on social media prove that nonconformity, too, is performative. Moeller and D’Ambrosio use the example of popular modern philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Han famously avoids many interviews and restricts private information about himself: “He is publicly marketed as an authentically private person.” 

Han evading the public eye, Lebron James posting about texts from his mom and, yes, Michael Cera owning a flip phone are all examples of public figures taking advantage of the opportunity to present themselves as authentic in a posthuman era.

Why? Because we live, as Han would suggest, in a “transparency society.” Everyone is aware, with every move they make, that they could be being filmed: me writing this in a coffee shop, Michael DeCoste dancing outside KAMS and, hey, maybe even the runaway cow roaming on the Main Quad.

Moeller and D’Ambrosio use the example of going on vacation. They claim, and I would agree, that we consciously or (at least) subconsciously consider how our getaway will be presented on social media. Would you rather visit the woodchipper display at the Fargo-Moorhead visitors center, or take the classic book-reading-on-the-beach photo at “Fort Laudyyy?” Come on, guys, we’ve all been on VSCO.

A person reads a book on a beach. (Flickr)

“Now, the image has gained the upper hand.”

When we visit a national park, we take the back-facing-looking-out-at-nature photo. When we go to Lollapalooza, we take pictures in front of Buckingham Fountain. How many times have you seen three-Snap long videos of concerts on someone’s private story?

A man sits facing a lake at a park. (Photo courtesy of Noah O’Connor)

This is not paranoia. This is our social code, the axis the Earth now spins on.

Our semi-staged performance extends beyond images and unknown college students, as well. In lieu of Plato’s “Euthyphro:” Do users plug a Bible quote in their Instagram bio because they identify with its goodness? Or do they identify with the Bible quote’s goodness because it suits their profile?

It doesn’t matter. We can’t know. 

According to Moeller and D’Ambrosio, “In the culture industries, making a show of social liberalism is increasingly the only option.” Social liberalism is the groundwork for celebrity and non-celebrity political stances and their “authenticity.” 

Users will repost “1984” quotes with reference to Trump; flyers about saving the environment; Bad Bunny’s “The Only Thing More Powerful than Hate is Love” scoreboard from the Super Bowl and anti-ICE announcements on their Instagram. But we have no f—ing idea if they believe it or not. (Hell, do they?)

“Authenticity. If you can fake that, the rest will take care of itself,” according to marketing expert and author Seth Godin.

Friends pose in front of Clarence F. Buckingham Memorial Fountain. (Photo courtesy of Anna Duda.)

We cannot know if George Clooney is really a Democrat or not, and it doesn’t matter. In this era of profilicity, we can’t know anyone’s true motives or beliefs. Instead, the presentation of one’s beliefs through social media is, despite not being authentic, still the most real and effective performance of one’s identity. 

With all of this talk about being authentic or not, what is authenticity? 

Nonexistent. “Authenticity is not actually real,” according to Michael Serazio, professor in the Department of Communication at Boston College.

Which brings us to the grand marquee of this essay: Moeller and D’Ambrosio’s concept of the “nonauthentic” self. 

See, this isn’t an inherently negative viewpoint of the world. I am not renouncing social media, nor claiming everyone’s performativity makes the world a terrible place. 

We are no longer authentic; this is true. But we aren’t inauthentic, either. Instead, we now operate in the grey area of nonauthenticity.

Maybe I, the president of the Combating Screen Time Club, love Instagram. Maybe the club even uses Instagram to promote itself (it does). Does this matter? Not one bit.

As Moeller and D’Ambrosio discuss, doing something good is not nearly as good as posting a video of doing something good. Yacht-chartering Leonardo DiCaprio being an environmental activist is, whether you like it or not, infinitely more effective than Joe DoGood riding their bike to class. 

Donald Trump playing catch and Zohran Mamdani shoveling snow are, obviously, curated acts of nonauthenticity. Maybe Mamdani really does like shoveling snow. But do we care?

We don’t measure if he is actually a good person, but rather how good he is at acting as one while being filmed. And when politicians fail to act authentically (Gavin Newsom telling a predominantly Black audience that he can’t read a speech), we reprimand them for it. 

According to German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, “One can only become leader if he is capable of manipulating how he is observed.” 

The funny thing is, we already know this. And celebrities know we know it; yet we still accept it. What we can’t seem to accept is that we, too — the nonpoliticians, the nobodies — are also operating under the same mode of performance, the watchful eye of the Foucauldian panopticon. 

This extends beyond our own profiles, as well. Liking or commenting on a post is, while seemingly in support of a friend, actually another form of self-presentation. Actors don’t clap for Oscar winners because they’re happy for them; they clap because they don’t want to be clipped for being a sore loser, because they know they’re being watched. Sorry, T-Chal.

(Instagram courtesy of Anna Duda)

Users don’t like a post just because they like the post; they also like it because they know other people can see they liked it. Sure, users might leave 10 successive comments of “Omg you’re so cuuuute” on a friend’s post because they want to support them.

But they also do it because they know it will increase the number of comments and therefore the algorithmic visibility of their friends’ post; and the friend will be grateful to them for helping, therefore providing them social capital in the friendship. 

Our identities are dependent on others’ performance of their identities. Our Instagram post does better only if our friends act out of self-interest and improve the visibility of our own post by liking, commenting or reposting.

We live in a hemorrhaged science fiction-social reality because we constantly operate with the knowledge that we, or others, may clip our in-person actions and post them on our Instagram thread titled “:)” or OneBuzzIllinois.

We employ digital communication and social media as the interlocutor of truth — talking to them for 45 minutes at the bar is, somehow, less revealing than sliding into their DMs.

But let’s not overreact. 

First of all, other forms of performative identity don’t seem to be directly linked to how it will appear online. Butler wrote about identity with particular reference to gender, and how our roles in society are performed rather than assigned by birth. This need not be profilicity.

There are also those who play spikeball on the Main Quad or read books at the Illini Union Courtyard Café (me). Surely they are aware that they may be seen by students they know, but not necessarily with the thought of appearing on a Facebook Mom’s post about noisy kids. (Although they could end up as one of the University’s carefully curated pictures for their website to attract prospective students. Why else would our Quad be made of nonnative grass?)

An image of the Main Quad that is used on Illinois websites. (Photo courtesy of Fighting Illini Athletics)

And again, the observation that our identity is posthuman and dependent on social media for validation is, while implied, not absolutely negative. We can simultaneously combat the increasing need for cyberspace substantiation while also acknowledging that technology inevitably does change human behavior and history. Being mindful is different than being cynical. 

All of this said, “Alexander Fako, Senior Columnist” is my performative identity as an Opinions writer for The Daily Illini. I know which friends or people I like read my columns, so I include certain references to appeal to them. 

But maybe I don’t believe any of this — maybe I just take up these opinions because my columnist self has a reputation for having strong-voiced, controversial opinions. Perhaps I play the role of antagonist because I know “identity consists … in having a profile that is different from other profiles.”

Or maybe I just like people coming up to me at The Red Lion with a disappointed look on their face and asking, “You wrote that ALDI quarter column, didn’t you?”

Alex is a sophomore in LAS.

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