Ideal schmideal

From my experience dealing with avatars or profile pictures, I have learnt to always take them with a grain of salt (or a bucket in some cases). No one is ever going to be able to show you a complete rundown of themselves in the space of a Facebook ‘about me’, and so as E.T. Higgins, author of Self-Discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect, says; people ‘mediate their image, strengthen their virtues’. In doing so, people often present an image of their ideal self rather than their actual self. The following image from theincredible-s’s Tumblr page (2014) shows a humorous representation of Stage 1 of Baudrillard’s Hierarchy of Simulation (1994).

By creating this notion of an ‘ideal self’ it becomes apparent what societal ideals are nowadays. Just by playing Second Life or any other game requiring a custom avatar, you can see how people want to look, and how other people react to them. For example, if I were to create an avatar for an online game (lets just use Second Life as an example), and my avatar had bright green hair and wore a clown costume with fairy wings, no one would believe that was an accurate representation of what I actually look like, so why are we all so caught up on creating a ‘perfect’ looking avatar?

This need to be ‘perfect’, in my opinion, stems from a vast array of influences. One of the main influences on people these days is mainstream media. As seen in the image above (Refinery 29 2013), photos of otherwise beautiful people are ‘photoshopped’ to fit societal ideals. This falls into the second stage of Baudrillard’s Hierarchy of Simulation (1994), which is a misrepresentation of an original, created purely to fuel the need for an ideal world.

In my opinion, when I upload a photo of myself to Facebook or Instagram, I am the only one who actually cares about it. Sure, people may ‘like’ it or comment on it, but no one is sitting there thinking, “I wonder when Mollie is going to upload another photo of herself”. So why are we all trying to please people who really couldn’t care less?

References

Baudrillard, J 1994, Simulacra and Simulation, 2^nd ed. University of Michigan Press, USA.

Higgins, E. T. 1987, ‘Self Discrepancy: A Theory Relating Self and Affect’ Vol 94, Psychological Review, The American Psychological Association Inc. New York.

Theincredible-s, FB Profile Picture, photo tagged by friends, viewed 27 January 2014, <http://theincredible-s.tumblr.com/tagged/facebook>

‘Jennifer Lawrence Photoshop Fail’, Refinery 29, viewed 27 January 2014, <http://www.refinery29.com/2013/12/59162/jennifer-lawrence-flare-photoshop-fail>