The Digital Confessional

Are you the same person online and offline?

Image by redgreystock on Freepik

I have a small confession to make this week. No one from my ‘real’ (i.e., offline) life knows about this newsletter. Not my partner, not my family, and certainly none of my friends. To be honest, most of them don’t even know that I do or enjoy this sort of writing. Whenever my boyfriend sees me passionately typing away on a Sunday afternoon and asks what I’m doing, my reply is usually “uhmm, just stuff”.  

I’ve thought a lot about why I want to keep this part of my life so private. It’s not like I write about anything particularly vulnerable or controversial (I mean, who among us hasn’t grappled with loneliness or the more toxic parts of hustle culture at one point or another?). But somehow, the idea of someone who knows me offline reading my words and reconciling my writing with their perception of me makes me cringe, like I’m letting them peek into my diary. Yelling into the online void paradoxically feels more private than sharing these thoughts with my irl community.

We’re all well-aware of the fact that how we communicate online is very different to how we communicate in person. A large part of this arises from the “online disinhibition effect”, which was coined by psychologist John Suler in 2004. In a nutshell, the online disinhibition effect refers to the fact that being online tends to lower our inhibitions, which helps us to open up more. This has both good and bad consequences: we see the online disinhibition effect manifested in trolling, mean comments, and abusive online behavior (“toxic disinhibition”), but also in the creation of supportive online environments where we can be vulnerable, raise awareness, and get support (“benign disinhibition”).

According to Suler, one of the factors that causes the disinhibition effect is dissociative anonymity, which he describes like this:

“When people have the opportunity to separate their actions online from their in-person lifestyle and identity, they feel less vulnerable about self-disclosing and acting out. Whatever they say or do can’t be directly linked to the rest of their lives. In a process of dissociation, they don’t have to own their behavior by acknowledging it within the full context of an integrated online/offline identity. The online self becomes a compartmentalized self”

Suler mostly invoked dissociative anonymity to explain the rise of deviant online behavior, like posting mean comments. In his view, dissociation creates a distance between our online and offline selves, which allows us to feel less responsible for our online actions. But it’s notable that Suler’s paper on this topic was published in 2004, when Facebook was just getting started and Twitter and Youtube were still a few years away. What’s become very clear in the decades since is that dissociative anonymity influences many behaviors beyond deviance.

Through the distance created by dissociative anonymity, the internet grants us an unprecedented degree of control over our image. We get to choose how we present ourselves online to a far greater degree than in-person, fine-tuning pictures and captions, carefully editing witty tweets, and cutting out all imperfections and awkwardness. We can present a distinct, compartmentalized self - it’s still you, but just a slightly edited version. This still doesn’t guarantee complete control over how our online selves will be received and perceived by others, but it does allow us to create a specific digital persona (or personal brand, if you prefer). 

Offline, I am a person, with lots of messy and discordant needs, wants, moods, and habits. My offline identity has some better and worse parts, but is mostly comprised of a lot of inconsistencies that make me hard to cleanly categorize. I’m sure some of you will relate to worrying about things like “Am I a real writer if I only wrote one day this week?” or “Can I call myself a vegetarian if I’m like, 99% meat-free but will occasionally cave to a burger craving after a long day?”. Online, I can be as perfectly two-dimensional as I wish: an aesthetic stream of healthy what-I-eat-in-a-day videos (late-night cookie snack not included), or a set of smart, eloquent essays (with hundreds of terrible drafts sitting in the junk folder, sight unseen).

Creating an online identity is fun! It’s almost like creating a Sim. There’s a much wider personality palette available for you to pick from (within reason - we don’t like catfish!): you can be the funny one, the social one, the athletic one. You can inhabit the persona you aspire to be by just being a bit more selective about what you post, rather than changing your lifestyle in more fundamental ways.

Through my writing, I’ve created a new online persona. I talk about work and wellness, topics I’m interested in but don’t get to discuss as much in my offline life. I’ve found a wonderful new community through Substack. Crucially, I love having a space where I can consistently practice my writing, get feedback from others, but not feel too much pressure of it having to be perfect. As a new-ish writer, this has been incredibly helpful: I accept the fact that my initial attempts are probably not going to be that great, push through the perfectionism, and just keep writing anyway.

I love the exploration and acceptance that this online identity has afforded me. But integrating it with my offline life has been harder. Truth is, I’m not ready to be a beginner in front of people in real life yet. Somehow it feels safer to practice and fuck up in front of a larger group of similarly semi-anonymous readers, instead of a close-knit circle of friends who I’ll have to make eye contact with after I let them read my less-than-perfect essay.

It’s not that I don’t want anyone to read my writing - of course I do. The communicative aspect of writing on Substack - sharing an idea, seeing whether it resonates with others, having a conversation about it in the comments - is the best part of it all for me, hands down. 

But if I’m being fully honest, I don’t feel ready to fully see how people perceive my writing just yet. If you don’t like me online, you’re free to never engage with me ever again, and I wouldn’t even know (of course, this is only true for someone with a smaller online presence, when you don’t really have to deal with mean comments or trolls!). But if you don’t like me in person, I have to contend with your judgment much more proximally. It feels exactly like the dissociative anonymity Suler was talking about: I get to write, but also to absolve myself from the full sense of judgment about my writing. It’s like taking my glasses off to live in an illusory world that seems softer and blurrier for a little while, instead of fully facing the more defined, sharp reality.

As someone who pretty much grew up online, I find that intersecting my online and offline selves can be complicated. In person, I’m shy, self-conscious, and perfectionistic. My online self is more vulnerable and open in a way. The disinhibition and semi-anonymity afforded by the internet have made it feel like a safe space to explore new things that I don’t feel fully comfortable sharing with my offline communities. My online and offline identities still feel like separate worlds most of the time, and I feel a bit weird about blending them, like I’d be making friends from very different walks of life hang out together.

I’m honestly not sure how common this is. Many of my peers post incessantly on social media, which makes it feel like their online identity is more of an extension of their offline selves, rather than a separate thing altogether. I wonder whether I’ll ever consider my writing to be ‘good enough’ to share with my offline communities, or what it would take to feel comfortable being a beginner and learning in front of others in real life. But in any case, I’m grateful for the opportunities provided by the dissociative anonymity of the internet. I love the process of discovering and cultivating many different parts of identities - be it online or offline.

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I’m super curious to hear what you think about this topic, if anyone has any thoughts! Do you feel like your online self is different from your offline self in any way? Do you find it easy to share your writing, art, music, or other creative experiments / side projects with your offline community?