Internet personas and self perception

Outer Heaven

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In the last few years the concept of a parasocial relationship has been widely discussed as the long term psychological effects of social media have become more apparent than in the early 2010s. What is less frequently discussed however is the psychological effect a person's online persona can have on themselves rather than on others.

For the average social media user who uses Instagram with their real name as their handle and a photo of themselves as their avatar, the online persona is simply an extension of their real self. Their persona could be exaggerated or beautified but always remains tied to the way they normally see themselves. This gets complicated when people adopt pseudonyms and use avatars. While using a separate persona, users may think they are disconnected from their online profile but will typically personally connect to their persona on some level. An example of this is person's username being separate from their real name. Unless your username is a random string of letters, you recognize your username references you, even if you have no emotional connection to it like your real name.

Since people believe that there is at least a small disconnect from their online persona (their avatar isn't literally them for example), people don't seem to realize that personas affect the way we view ourselves in real life. In the same way there is scientific evidence that playing a tall character in a video game makes people more confident in real life, I believe that internet personas can shape self perception both positively and negatively.

Taking this into consideration, are men becoming more feminine because they have waifu avatars that they unconsciously project onto themselves? How do retarded usernames affect the way people view themselves? Do shitty usernames have the same effect on people as last names that start with letters towards the end of the alphabet? The internet might be messing with our self perception in ways we don't even understand.

What is your opinion on all of this? Am I schizo rambling or are anime girl avatars scientifically more gay than other users? What about playing as a female character in all your video games because "I'd rather be looking at ass for 60 hours instead of a man bro"? Is this effect negligible or should we pay more attention to it when using the internet?
 
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FamousPainter

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The username and avatar is very significant, I think you can pierce through someones persona easily, depending on how much they give away and express themselves, but it's never completely, you(me) are always a little under the spell.

Yes I want to have sex with anyone with a cute girl avatar, 2d or not, and even after becoming very familiar with that person and knowing it's just some dude that says edgy shit online, my unconscious or subconscious or whatever still is slightly fooled, there's still some faint power over me. It's good to be aware of this, I'm sure most people aren't.
 
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Kolph

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At this point I assume anyone with an anime profile picture is probably a bit odd.

I agree that there is this sense of avatars reflecting a user's inner persona, with people with cartoon, anime, cutesy, avatars usually being more girly in manner. However, this is not truly reflective as you do have internet tough guys having avatars of Greek statues or random soldiers when they are absolute melts as a person, so while your observation has quite a bit of validity it does fall flat in some areas.

But another thing worth observing is how people's personas online and offline contrast too. People can end up creating alternative personalities due to the veil of anonymity and a different side of them unlike how they are in real life comes out. The online world really changes how we think and act, potentially reflecting our true selves better, thanks to the tools offered and usually a lack of consequence in expressing ourselves fully, especially with online echo chambers.
 
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Men are becoming more feminine for a myriad of reasons: environmental factors, nurture, culture, diet, broken homes, lack of parental roles, education, propaganda, imbalanced laws, xenoestrogens, microplastics, the water supply turning frogs gay... it's a bit rich thinking that the anime avatar is at fault after considering all that. Reminds me of the usual imageboard accusation that anime leads to transexualism, despite transexualism being pretty much tied to American culture. Japan, (continental) Europe and Latin America all were exposed to anime earlier than the US but guess where the problem is. But I digress. People can fake a myriad of personas and the avatars go as far as the cover of a book can inform about the quality of the writing, which is to say, unreliably. Aesthetics only inform of aesthetics and every attempt to find deeper meaning in it leads to disappointment.

Only now, in the age of non-anonymous social media, I find people taking issue in how someone may choose to self-portray visually. 15 years ago nobody cared about whatever avatars or usernames the others had. Au contraire, using your real name and real pic on the internet is what leads to people being fake and behaving weirdly. The search for external validation tied into your public persona is one of the reasons why the internet is a cesspit right now. If anything you got it backwards; the guy with the anime avatar and stupid username is perhaps one of the freest men in today's first world.
 

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Taking this into consideration, are men becoming more feminine because they have waifu avatars that they unconsciously project onto themselves? How do retarded usernames affect the way people view themselves? Do shitty usernames have the same effect on people as last names that start with letters towards the end of the alphabet? The internet might be messing with our self perception in ways we don't even understand.
Bro, don't ruin my fantasy of being a glitched asian woman and a mutant snowman in few sentences.
 
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Outer Heaven

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But another thing worth observing is how people's personas online and offline contrast too. People can end up creating alternative personalities due to the veil of anonymity and a different side of them unlike how they are in real life comes out. The online world really changes how we think and act, potentially reflecting our true selves better, thanks to the tools offered and usually a lack of consequence in expressing ourselves fully, especially with online echo chambers.
I agree with this but think its a feedback loop. A person might use an avatar of something they like, maybe even secretly like, but in turn that avatar becomes a proxy for how they see themselves, making the avatar a bigger part of their identity than it would have been otherwise. Unlike a parasocial relationship for example this effect is two way thing since you can control your avatar and arnt just receiving input.

Men are becoming more feminine for a myriad of reasons: environmental factors, nurture, culture, diet, broken homes, lack of parental roles, education, propaganda, imbalanced laws, xenoestrogens, microplastics, the water supply turning frogs gay... it's a bit rich thinking that the anime avatar is at fault after considering all that. Reminds me of the usual imageboard accusation that anime leads to transexualism, despite transexualism being pretty much tied to American culture. Japan, (continental) Europe and Latin America all were exposed to anime earlier than the US but guess where the problem is. But I digress. People can fake a myriad of personas and the avatars go as far as the cover of a book can inform about the quality of the writing, which is to say, unreliably. Aesthetics only inform of aesthetics and every attempt to find deeper meaning in it leads to disappointment.
I disagree. In MTF cases its become increasing clear that most transgenderism is an issue of autogynophilia rather than simple dysphoria. Your avatar is an extension of yourself. If your persona is an anime girl and you perceive your persona as yourself you play into autogynophilia. The fetish here is the sexual rush they feel from feeling like a woman, which fits in very well with this theory. Go on twitter and count how many FTM trannies have anime girl profile pictures to affirm their sense of self. They're doing it understanding the effect it has on them to some degree.
Only now, in the age of non-anonymous social media, I find people taking issue in how someone may choose to self-portray visually. 15 years ago nobody cared about whatever avatars or usernames the others had. Au contraire, using your real name and real pic on the internet is what leads to people being fake and behaving weirdly. The search for external validation tied into your public persona is one of the reasons why the internet is a cesspit right now. If anything you got it backwards; the guy with the anime avatar and stupid username is perhaps one of the freest men in today's first world.
I never said that having a persona makes you act fake online. I'm saying that the people are subconsciously influenced by the way they portray themselves online because they don't consciously think of their persona as themselves. People think that there is more of a disconnect between themselves and their persona because it has a fake name and fake avatar but their brain doesn't see it that way. Its like a method actor internalizing behaviours from a role they play. Regardless of how close the role is to their actual self, the actor only sees it as a role but comes to embody the role's mannerisms subconsciously over time.
 
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Lukeas1111

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Who cares, an anime profile picture isn't grounds to judge a person. As long as a person remains a healthy social life, something as trivial as their pfp won't change anything significant about them. Humans fundamentally look towards other people's perceptions of themselves, so If a person has a healthy social life with friends who aren't toxic assholes, that is where they will base their personality. However, if a person does not have "actual" friends or any friends at all, then they will start looking for other things to define themselves like the way they display themselves online. So in that sense, I guess you are correct.
 
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FamousPainter

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Anime avatar people are a lot of times based tbh. There's better tells and signs to stereotype if you want to pile together a type of online personality.
Anime profile pic people are probably infamous because people are left scarred when they get bodied by someone with a smug loli picture.

Who cares, an anime profile picture isn't grounds to judge a person. As long as a person remains a healthy social life, something as trivial as their pfp won't change anything significant about them. Humans fundamentally look towards other people's perceptions of themselves, so If a person has a healthy social life with friends who aren't toxic assholes, that is where they will base their personality. However, if a person does not have "actual" friends or any friends at all, then they will start looking for other things to define themselves like the way they display themselves online. So in that sense, I guess you are correct.
Nobody has a "healthy social life with friends who aren't toxic assholes" stop it.
 
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Lukeas1111

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Anime avatar people are a lot of times based tbh. There's better tells and signs to stereotype if you want to pile together a type of online personality.
Anime profile pic people are probably infamous because people are left scared when they get bodied by someone with a smug loli picture.


Nobody has a "healthy social life with friends who aren't toxic assholes" stop it.
Ok bro ima keep it real with you. Who tf gets scared of a "smug-loli" pfp. And having a healthy social life with friends who aren't toxic assholes is a pretty normal thing '_'
 
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FamousPainter

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Ok bro ima keep it real with you. Who tf gets scared of a "smug-loli" pfp. And having a healthy social life with friends who aren't toxic assholes is a pretty normal thing '_'
I meant scarred, like mentally. That's why they lash out. I've seen this from back in the day on imageboards to nowdays twitter, the anime girl gets under peoples skin, that is a fact.
 
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There's a philosophy professor who runs a YouTube channel that talks about Profilicity. He focuses more on people who attach their real identities with their digital ones. People who use pictures of themselves and their real names. But ultimately using an avatar is just a more abstracted version of that. However, it's in abstraction where the magic is. While there are many contributing factors for the rise of transgenderism, it is a noticeable trend that a lot of trannies (particularly biological men who identify as women) often use cute anime girl avatars. And more significantly, many likely used cute anime profiles before they had any idea that they identified as women.

I used the term magic, and that was intentional as it is the art of manifesting one's will into reality. However, if you do not understand yourself, then you go through life with an unfocused will, dominated by your subconscious. This is why Evola's Introduction to Magic is focused on getting you to understand the deepest parts of yourself. This is also why Jung, who shared a fascination with alchemy believed it was of the utmost importance for people to do the psychological work of understanding their core, their center, and aiming for individuation. If you don't, then you will be ruled by all sorts of subconscious whims.

Your profile is a digital version of yourself. Jungian thinkers, particularly those who embrace some of his more mystical theories, believe that there are multiple selves. Or rather that the "self", is actually a collection of different things. The unawakened person (spiritually and/or psychologically) identifies themselves as being their Ego. But the Ego is just one part of the self. We also have personas which we attach ourselves to in different contexts. The way I interpret it, is that personas are like the Ego's clothing. But the more dominant a given persona becomes, it begins to wear it's user, rather then its user wearing it.

Avatars and usernames are a digital persona. If you stick around on anonymous image boards, or use multiple forums and use different avatars on each and frequently change them, then I think your digital persona is probably fairly weak. But if you use a given website a lot, and stick to the same username and avatar, then I think that persona grows in influence. And if you use the same username and/or avatar across different websites, then I think the digital persona essentially becomes your digital alter ego. This gives room for subconscious desires to manifest in a plane of reality (cyberspace, which is a real yet unreal place). And if you spend a lot of time online with that digital persona, eventually those clothes will stick onto your ego. And that can result in your real identity becoming infected by your digital identity. I think a not insignificant amount of biologically male trannies that like anime and spend most of their time online are such cases. They are merely trying to become their digital conception of them self. Going with a more flexible and nuanced understanding of magic, in a sense they are cursed. Because they don't know themselves (because they aren't really engaged with reality, spending most of their time and energy online), they have allowed a digital persona with all of its subconscious projections to take them over.
 
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SEVEN

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Maybe Im a total freakazoid but in all honesty I find my "internet persona" to be the realest version of myself. so much so that in my head I tend to refer to myself as "SEVEN" rather than my given name of Nick. now because Im not an asshole I dont expect people to bend to my whims and start referring to me as such because that'd just be gay and pointless. and your boi dont do that shit.

But to me names are pretty much useless anyway, I dont much identify with them. they are utilitarian and useful so thats why they exist. better than calling everybody "you" or "that guy" and just getting confused on who exactly is being talked to and/or about.

Im not totally detached from my real life of course, I have friends and I spend far more time offline than I do on. but on the internet you dont have all those social barriers.

I act pretty much the same online and off when with friends or family, but its when Im at work or dealing with the public normies that I have to hone it in a bit. become more "palatable" if you will. but everybody does this to some extent and humans have adjusted their behaviors depending on environment and groups sense the dawn of our species.

certainly having these different personas can be dangerous for some people, particularly those with already underlying predispositions. but it comes down to the individual and how they choose to interact with themselves. its all about self image, so learn to love yourself. and not in that homo snowflake "everybody is special" and "you are perfect the way you are" way, but to truly understand who you are and to know that you must learn to be hard on yourself when you spot inner weakness. true love wont tolerate weaknesses, you must care for yourself so much and in such a way that you can produce the best crop. a firm hand mixed with that tender self love. no lube bebe.

we all know people act differently in the privacy of their own homes, so is the distinction between online and off really any different? my "online" persona is basically just my "at home alone or hanging out with close friends" persona.
 

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Aesthetics only inform of aesthetics
Gonna steal that one, chief.

I think it depends on the degree of how much one assumes a persona. For most people its probably just a matter of aesthethic choice, like saying, "Hey, I like how this looks. If you like it too maybe we can get along", or maybe even "I belong to this subculture, fyi". But the moment an user gets into the paradigm of performing towards an audience, like both content creators and narcissists do, there's a need to establish a solid, unique, identity.

There's not only a need to be recognized and remembered, but also to establish rapport. Without an adequate avatar that embodies recognizable traits its almost impossible to build rapport and thus create a relationship, para-social or not. Think about the difference between pewdiepie reading >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk comments vs one of the many text-to-speech channels that scrapes the site's top of all time. Its almost the same performance, but there's a huge difference in rapport and thus long term support of audience members. You won't see people creating fanfics of text-to-speech channels, at least I don't think so :monkaW: .

So now you get performers that either choose to remain anonymous or to dissasociate themselves from their IRL persona, and that's where the disconnects begin to happen. I believe your seeing people that perform femenine because they want to be read as femenine, simple as.
 
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Outer Heaven

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There's a philosophy professor who runs a YouTube channel that talks about Profilicity. He focuses more on people who attach their real identities with their digital ones. People who use pictures of themselves and their real names. But ultimately using an avatar is just a more abstracted version of that. However, it's in abstraction where the magic is. While there are many contributing factors for the rise of transgenderism, it is a noticeable trend that a lot of trannies (particularly biological men who identify as women) often use cute anime girl avatars. And more significantly, many likely used cute anime profiles before they had any idea that they identified as women.

I used the term magic, and that was intentional as it is the art of manifesting one's will into reality. However, if you do not understand yourself, then you go through life with an unfocused will, dominated by your subconscious. This is why Evola's Introduction to Magic is focused on getting you to understand the deepest parts of yourself. This is also why Jung, who shared a fascination with alchemy believed it was of the utmost importance for people to do the psychological work of understanding their core, their center, and aiming for individuation. If you don't, then you will be ruled by all sorts of subconscious whims.

Your profile is a digital version of yourself. Jungian thinkers, particularly those who embrace some of his more mystical theories, believe that there are multiple selves. Or rather that the "self", is actually a collection of different things. The unawakened person (spiritually and/or psychologically) identifies themselves as being their Ego. But the Ego is just one part of the self. We also have personas which we attach ourselves to in different contexts. The way I interpret it, is that personas are like the Ego's clothing. But the more dominant a given persona becomes, it begins to wear it's user, rather then its user wearing it.

Avatars and usernames are a digital persona. If you stick around on anonymous image boards, or use multiple forums and use different avatars on each and frequently change them, then I think your digital persona is probably fairly weak. But if you use a given website a lot, and stick to the same username and avatar, then I think that persona grows in influence. And if you use the same username and/or avatar across different websites, then I think the digital persona essentially becomes your digital alter ego. This gives room for subconscious desires to manifest in a plane of reality (cyberspace, which is a real yet unreal place). And if you spend a lot of time online with that digital persona, eventually those clothes will stick onto your ego. And that can result in your real identity becoming infected by your digital identity. I think a not insignificant amount of biologically male trannies that like anime and spend most of their time online are such cases. They are merely trying to become their digital conception of them self. Going with a more flexible and nuanced understanding of magic, in a sense they are cursed. Because they don't know themselves (because they aren't really engaged with reality, spending most of their time and energy online), they have allowed a digital persona with all of its subconscious projections to take them over.
You put it better than I ever could. The last paragraph in particular is important to think about when using the internet. How much your persona affects your self perception is proportional to the time and effort you put into it. The only solutions are to have a hundred different personas or make damn sure your main persona isn't messing with your head.

On a tangent, someone should make a Perfect Blue style movie where the main character's online persona torments them not because of other people's perception of it but because of the persona warping their perception of themselves in a way that gets manifested into reality.
 
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SomaSpice

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But if you use a given website a lot, and stick to the same username and avatar, then I think that persona grows in influence.
Hm, I should watch myself. I don't need no masks.
 
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You put it better than I ever could. The last paragraph in particular is important to think about when using the internet. How much your persona affects your self perception is proportional to the time and effort you put into it. The only solutions are to have a hundred different personas or make damn sure your main persona isn't messing with your head.

On a tangent, someone should make a Perfect Blue style movie where the main character's online persona torments them not because of other people's perception of it but because of the persona warping their perception of themselves in a way that gets manifested into reality.
I think so long as you "have a life", as people used to say, and don't primarily live online the risks are negligible. It also depends how vulnerable you are irl. If you have a solid role that you feel fulfilled by in the real world, your digital persona won't matter as much to you. But if you're a NEET or just somebody who doesn't have a lot going on for them irl, you'll likely compensate by over identifying with your online persona.

Also, I really, really like that idea of yours! It's quite different but somewhat similar in focus. My VN (link in my sig) is about a nocturnal NEET who lives in front of screens and actively rejects reality. He runs a blog about retro digital media and that's his only interaction with people.
 
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Interesting question. Ruby's reply pretty much summed up what I wanted to say.

If you look back at it, the internet really started to go haywire as fuck when 'non-anonymous' social media started to become more common. People did not have a fictional persona to hide behind (which could've kept, for the most, a distinction between a fantasy persona and the real individual, it was, in some way, only a fragment of the person that was posing as this fantasy persona, if that makes sense), so they started feeling the pressure of acting "perfect". Someone with an anime catgirl avatar wouldn't be recognized in the street. There is no expectation that if you meet this person, they "have to be perfectly in line with what you know", if that makes sense.

If anything, I think the most likely to fracture a person's identity is the "real identity" persona, not the one where they portray themselves as an anime girl. Also, for some, the internet is the only place where they can truly express who they are or they feel they are (which is valid as well, I have no right to judge on the validity of a person's feelings, because I'm not in their head and don't know what they're experiencing). For me, it's only on the internet right now that I can use my preferred name (not a case of gender, but of... general identity, I have never identified with my "default" identity, name, nationality, but I can't change my ethnicity and I wouldn't want to, either), because it sounds too foreign in my birth country. It still doesn't mean that I have forgotten who is the real me or anything like that. The real me, on the contrary, is not the one that I was expected to be "by default". I felt "different" before my online personas came up.

Taking this into consideration, are men becoming more feminine because they have waifu avatars that they unconsciously project onto themselves?

Nah, I don't think it's because of that. It's being increasingly discouraged to be masculine in our societies. Women are supposed to be empowered but at the same time still helpless little victims of the big bad men (if those men are white, cisgender and straight, they're worse than fucking Satan himself). Being born a boy today must be horrible because nowadays, having XY chromosomes makes you automatically an oppressive, animalistic, exploitative, mean person. If you're white you're also racist, if you're straight you're homophobic, if you're cis you're transphobic. You're basically the enemy of everyone.

You'll have all the accusations of rape, pedophilia, abuse pinned on you until proven otherwise. If the girl you have just fucked has lied to you about birth control you'll very likely end up with having to pay child support for a kid you'll never see. You'll be expected to never show any emotion, as if not human at all, because "boys don't cry" and you should "man up". I don't like saying this as a woman myself, and I may just be mistaken, but I feel society is becoming increasingly hysterical due to this unbalance in femininity/masculinity. In the past it was overly masculine, now it's tipping on the other side, while it should be in the middle for optimum results, like everything, imo. But I think we've got a long way to go before we reach this balance, unfortunately.
 
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It depends on the person. Someone who's secure with their IRL persona can still have errm... suspect avatars without calling their sexuality/identity into question. If anything I see them more as "suits" you can wear and discard any time at will. Sort of like a mild version of cosplay if you'll imagine. It can be off-putting at first, sure I get that, but if your base core ultimately remains the same I say live and let live and carpe diem. FWIW, I say this as someone who flirts with this stuff to an inordinate degree. My appearance, how I actually present and conduct myself, couldn't be more diametrically opposed. Just to amplify what Kolph said earlier its more "I put this online so it doesn't seep out in real life" as opposed to "To become the waifu I must therefore lop off my dick". Though, I'm sure there's plenty of outliers (Or perhaps I'm the outlier I dunno lol). SEVEN also hits it square on the nail.

Just my honest thoughts. I'm no psychologist :)
 

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Who cares, an anime profile picture isn't grounds to judge a person. As long as a person remains a healthy social life, something as trivial as their pfp won't change anything significant about them. Humans fundamentally look towards other people's perceptions of themselves, so If a person has a healthy social life with friends who aren't toxic assholes, that is where they will base their personality. However, if a person does not have "actual" friends or any friends at all, then they will start looking for other things to define themselves like the way they display themselves online. So in that sense, I guess you are correct.
I agree with this post. I'd say your internet persona affects you psychologically only if you're invested in it a lot. I never really cared about how I'm being perceived on the internet, proof of that being that most of my time was spent on anonymous image boards, I guess. To me an anime pfp is just a way to say okay this is my user in case you forgot my name, and also I like this character.

I also think that people who are less invested in their online persona have a harder time making friends online, but that might be a different topic?
 
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