Since leaving my hometown alone a month ago to knuckle down and work on some difficult writing projects, I noticed my social media habits increase.
Sure, I am in Asia right now and most of my friends are not, so the social contact helps with my solitude. But because of the nature of the work I am attempting here — looking inward, finding the vestiges of my culture in the ways I behave and see my world — I have started using social media in a more overtly self-imagining way, expressing what I think are funny or interesting visions of myself. As in, my Facebook profile has become a shrine to comic selfies. Part narcissism, part self-critique. At least that's what I tell myself.
In his poem 'The Leopard Muses on His Spots', Texan poet Paul Ruffin wrote in the voice of a leopard, 'We are given what we have/and left with what we've got.' This is a complex statement about identity: the leopard is talking about his spots, unchangeable, but in a sense produced by his human keepers.
It refers to markers of social identity, which are blindly produced within a culture, a time and place that is nearly invisible to us because it is impossible to remove ourselves from it. And then they are reproduced within our culture by the people around us in order to differentiate and relate. The leopard is produced by the fact of his spots and reproduced by his human keepers in order to interact with him based on his leopardhood.
This a roundabout way of approaching the nature of a personality, and what it means to behaviours in a social system we all belong to.
Social media requires us to produce 'profiles' of ourselves that represent our cultural aspirations; not only who we are, but who we imagine we would like to be, and how we comment on our conditions of being. This exercise is often liberating and creative. But as it is, the digital sphere is not as innocent as mere self-expression.
The first consideration is the extent to which ingratiating ourselves in mainstream digital cultures turns us not only into consumers, but commercial products. And the second consideration is what this continuous assertion of our individuated identity — defining our positions though taste, image, consumption habits — might do for our political cultures. As in, the more we believe that we are inherently self-made, essential beings, our capacity to recognise the cultural and economic forces greater than us suffers.
The Myers Briggs personality test is still a widely-used tool in the human resources sector for matching candidates to corporate positions. There are still certain parts of town where you can't go very far without being asked your 'sign'. Personalities are powerful forces, but they do not exist in a vacuum. A simple focus on the individuated self — this is who I am, this is what I am made of (Lisa Simpson, Sagittarius, ENFP, emotional age 13) — which does not take into account the social and political conditions of a person's existence, is dangerous.
Even looking at the questions that comprise a Myers Briggs test shows how limited its assessment of personhood really is. Respondents are asked to respond to statements such as: 'You trust reason rather than feelings' (which is totally inane — how can you extract the two?); 'You feel at ease in a crowd' (what crowd? What situation, on what day?); 'You find it difficult to talk about your feelings' (In which register? There are so many levels of discourse people communicate through: absence, actions, speaking to, through or about).
These responses depend on how a person sees themselves, rather than how they might really behave in a situation. And how they see themselves is determined by their values, which are cultural and not at all static.
We are obsessed with the typology of people. There are scientific and psudo-scientific and outright magical and commercial ways of viewing the typology of humans, but there is something worrying to me about the fixation on it, particularly the celebration of personality types. They are ways of saying you exist, and that you are essential. Not, that you are produced by a number of cultural and political factors that are beyond your control, which you will have to work hard to recognise, and even harder to escape.
Perhaps it is more useful to look to the conditions which require us to be individuated and essential in the first place: a market culture in which you are defined by your consumption habits, not your quirky journey towards self-knowledge. And then we can go back to asking ourselves the serious questions, such as which Game of Thrones character are you? (Daenerys Targaryen.)
Ellena Savage has written about literature, feminism, and political culture for publications including Overland, Australian Book Review, Right Now, The Lifted Brow, and Farrago, which she co-edited in 2010. She tweets as @RarrSavage