Shelby 1

Shelby Schmitt

Professor Mark Nunes

IDS3250-101

11 December 2017

Digiphrenia

Over the past several years theres been an interesting cultural phenomenon occurring

amongst young people; the Finsta. A Fake-Instagram, or Finsta, is a persons secret

Instagram, where they post their emotional tirades, ugly, unedited photos, and the true gritty

snapshots of the sometimes less than perfect activities they partake in. A form of escapism from

their real Instagram, which only displays thoroughly edited, proof-read, peer approved content,

the Finsta allows one to be more vulnerable and can be a stark contrast from the seemingly

flawless life pictured on their real account.

These Finstas help exemplify the digital fragmentation of our human condition that

Douglas Rushkoff defines as Digiphrenia. Though the person who creates both the Real

Instagram and the Finsta are the same, two very different personalities are reflected. These

multiple personalities exist for all people across all sorts of platforms on the internet, and we are

caught up in a constant effort to update, validate, and strengthen these profiles. It is a digital

bombardment (Rushkoff, 75) of information, and as we divide ourselves up into different digital

extensions to absorb these blasts we also create a different virtual impression of us. Each new

digital version of ourselves is slightly different than the last, slightly fine-tuned for our purpose

on the chosen network. For example, you might come across as very proper, well educated,

thoughtful and concise on a AsULearn site for a class while simultaneously appearing to be a

crazed social liberal on a Twitter that you use for personal use. Both of these aspects of your
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personality exist simultaneously within you in the true now of coherent human living, but online,

they reflect multiple personalities, and a schizophrenic cacophony of temporal disconnect,

(Rushkoff, 75).

In the video I created, I attempted to illustrate this schizophrenic cacophony by bringing

to life the perceived personalities that exist as me on my four main online networks: Facebook,

Twitter, Instagram and AsULearn. I asked people for their perceptions of me based upon the

content of just ONE of these online profiles, and after trying to extrapolate all personal bias, I

was able to formulate four very different stereotypes of myself. I observed that if I were to ask a

question like What do you like to do for fun, these perceived online versions of myself would

all seem to have very different answers, even though they were all me.

My video project follows a detective searching for The Real Shelby, but as he

discovers by the end of the video, on the internet, reality can be hard to pinpoint. The video I

created may seem a goofy and lighthearted, but it illustrates the real-life concurrence of these

digital personas, and by doing so demonstrates the bizarre reality of the modern-day Internet. By

constantly posting across various platforms online to adamantly prove that we are really living,

our personalities have become fractured and differed in order to meet the demands of the

networks we use. Therefore, the more we use the Internet, the more we only succeed in making

ourselves less authentic-less real. And the shock that comes with trying to reconcile the tension

between our online personas and our true, real life selves?

That is Digiphrenia.
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Works Cited

Rushkoff, Douglas. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. Current, 2014.