I found myself acting like contrasting persons when I’m in front of my friends and my parents. Sometimes I’ll even act differently in one friend group from another. My voice and tone, my gestures, and the words I use are noticeably different.

I ponder about this a lot when reflecting about the personas I construct online and realised that I do the exact same thing in social media. Nancy Baym (cited in Smith and Watson 2014:70) found that the activities that people construct online are closely intertwined with their construction of the offline world. So how I act in real life, how I ‘change’ personality depending on the situation translates to how I construct my virtual self.

At first, I thought about looking at how differently I portray myself in my Instagram vs. my personal Twitter account. But then I realised that I might not have to look that far. You see, I have two Instagram account – namely my main and 2nd account – where I’m both active on. My main account is a public profile with my full name attached and is followed by my family and everyone I know while my 2nd account is private and is followed by just 20 of my closest friends.

On my main account, every posts, captions, and comments, are well thought off. It took me hours to choose and edit a single picture before spending another hour contemplating on whether to actually post it. On the other hand, I could post 3 times a day about the most random things on my 2nd account and I don’t really filter anything there. I would make sure that my feed is presentable and the color palette fit each other on my main account but I would just post a photo of a meme or my cats in compromising situations without thinking on my 2nd account.

Similarly, although in both I share a glimpse of my personal life, the extent to which I do it is quite different. For example, when sharing about my favorite band I might post a nice video of the view from my room with their song as a background on my first account meanwhile on my 2nd I would probably post multiple stories of me singing (or screaming) along to their songs. But in a way, I found that doing this is not necessarily a bad thing. Even though I am not an influencer whose work is done through Instagram, I still think of my main account as an online portfolio where my ‘image’ is important.

Now, the pressing question is: which one is the real me? Is any of it even real at all?

Sometimes with the fabrication that occurs on social media people may be more wary on what is real and fake. Many believe that the identities we have, even digitally, relies on the apparently stable notion of the ‘true self’ (Brown, 2021). But in reality, even our ‘true self’ is never stable and instead is multifaceted and ever changing. And for the most part, all of the different bits that we show – both offline and offline – are just as authentic from the others. So the two versions of myself seen through my main and 2nd account are both ‘real’. It is also important to note that there is a conscious act in performing these different versions of myself (Marshall 2020:39). It’s almost like flipping a switch.

Furthermore, the differences in how we present ourselves may be more apparent digitally. Social media platforms that allows self presentation enables ‘endless opportunities for conveying some “truth” about an “authentic” self…’ (Smith and Watson 2014:75). This causes people to be more driven, and in a way comfortable, to experiment with and show different versions of themselves. This is why me and numerous others with multiple Instagram account or multiple social media presence of any kind are more able and keen to show the personas we have online. Another reason why personas are more apparent online is due to the digital world acting as a personal archive where we can “conserve the version of self” (Smith and Watson 2014:72). The two Instagram accounts I have are essentially storages of my different personas placed on the Internet for other people to see.

With all these in my mind, I can’t wait to see what personas I’ll evolve to a few years down the line. It would be interesting to see and compare it with the digital presence I have today.

Or maybe, just maybe, I might just delete everything and restart.