Pick Your Personality
In front of me I have catalogue for cell phones. The front cover of the catalog does not feature a phone or any image at all. There is nothing to show that this catalog is even selling phones. All there is on the cover is one simple word that sumps up our age: me. As I open the catalog, I discover that each page extols the virtues of the latest models of phones for the coming season. Each page features a model or models who in some way attempt to match the "personality" of the phone. Welcome to the world in which we are told we can be anyone we want to be, where identity is no longer based in a sense of self but rather in the imagery we choose at any particular moment. Cool, sexy, glamorous: these are the new social virtues.
How did we begin to lose our identities?
We are at a unique time in history. Our world has gone through intense political, economic, social, and technological change. If you lived one hundred years ago, you would have had a very different set of social expectations placed upon you. Your social success was directly connected to your character and community involvement. However, today we no longer look to social institutions and community to find our sense of self; rather, we seek to "be free", to "express ourselves", and to "be happy with ourselves". But how do we achieve these things? We have unprecedented personal freedom, but our freedom is accompanied by a haunting sense of being lost. To find a real sense of self, to discover who we really are, we first must work out how we got in the position we are in.
Source: Mark Sayers (2010), The Vertical Self, p.1-6
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