Last year, I had my creative writing showcased in the University of Sydney Union Creative Awards at Verge Gallery. I found myself unable to choose how to share this on social media. It was too creatively irrelevant for LinkedIn and too uncomfortably self-promotional for Instagram. While I entertained the idea of constructing a Substack or second Instagram devoted just to my writing — as many young creatives now do — this felt like splitting myself in two, which made me realise how seriously we have begun to take our digital personas; or, as Kyle Chayka, columnist of The New Yorker’s Infinite Scroll, calls them, our “shadow selves”. These alter egos must be crafted, fed, curated, and they are a direct phenomenon of the corrosion of social media boundaries, between real and digital life, and between inter-app limitations. I wonder if they’re really supposed to be us anymore?
“The curated self,” Bruce Wilson, tells Psychology Today, “is a product of the technological revolution.” In a time when almost every facet of our lives has been touched by digitisation, the way we curate and present ourselves has transformed. From social media profiles to personal blogs, digital archives, and AI-generated avatars, the ability to craft, manage, and refine our digital personas has never been greater. And, for the first time in history, everyday people are faced with the same liberties and anxieties around public image that were once reserved only for those famed and gloried. This intersection of technology and self-representation raises critical questions: How does digitisation influence our self-image? And what are the implications — both empowering and troubling — of this newfound agency over our identities?
These questions are both new, and not so new. Narcissus withered away by his lake, long before we downloaded Facebook. We know that thinking too long about oneself can be destructive, and that revealing too much in vanity can come back to bite. Self-branding asks the individual to adopt an unusual role as not just creator, but curator of identity. When we craft our alter-egos, our digital, larger-than-life selves, we are saying: these are the colours I like; these are the past-times I pursue; these are the artists, brands, and bands I feel aligned with; this is how little and how much I care. Thanks to the swell of media we now swim in, and the permeability of those dividing walls we call ‘real life’ and ‘online’ this self-branding extends to our most intimate, personal lives. Social platforms are the battered purple diary hiding under our bed, only to record memories, only to be read aloud to friends. Except there are more friends than you can fit into your bedroom, and they want, or rather you feel they want, only the very best stories. This curation impacts our deepest, most personal selves.
The digital revolution has enabled an unprecedented level of personal curation. In the past, self-presentation was largely constrained to the physical world — what we wore, how we spoke, and where we positioned ourselves within social circles. But today, we exist simultaneously in physical and digital spaces, with the latter often taking precedence. When we have access to everything, selection of anything becomes a significant symbol of our own palette, rather than an indicator of what we have geographic, social, and cultural access to. Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn allow individuals to curate their lives down to the smallest detail, from the way they appear to the thoughts they choose to share with the world. Unlike traditional forms of self-representation, which relied on external validation from family, friends, or colleagues, the digital self is increasingly under the control of the individual. Through selective posting, photo editing, and algorithm-driven content amplification, we have unprecedented power over how we are perceived.
Our Digital 2024, showed a new milestone of 5 billion social media users, increasing by 266 million since 2023. As the digital sphere grows, boundaries between social platforms collapse, meaning that business-specific content which may have once only had a home on LinkedIn, now has relevance to an increasingly monetised and business-populated Instagram. Vice versa, the death of the soulless professional affords leverage to more personalised, casual content on professional platforms. Audiences want an all-access pass to the ordinary people they follow in the same way they do public figures, and to satisfy that demand is to dissolve platform boundaries by curating content across all platforms, for all digital environments. Concurrently, 2024 saw significant critique of the state of LinkedIn, with many headlines echoing the same question, ‘Why has LinkedIn become so weird?’ Affiliate marketing and brand deals have seen influencers monetising their personal lives on social media for over a decade, highlighted in Australian minds with the recent release of Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar (2025). However, these shifts in LinkedIn, paired with more businesses adopting social media, has altered the environment in which users curate in a distinctly new manner. Growing up, we were told to bury digital traces of our social lives from future employers, now we’re told it has leverage. Diversity-hire culture and corporate tokenism means dialling up originality. It means we are aware that how naturally we stitch our digital selves together has the potential to make or break a career.
Diana Reid is an acclaimed young author who studied at the University of Sydney. Since navigating the digital, public transition from student to artist, she has voiced a number of concerns with the way she curates herself online. In a guest article for Elle she writes, “Before my first novel came out in 2021, I purged my Instagram grid…I’d maintained a sparse, strictly professional presence for so long that even re-sharing one Instagram Story of me and my friends at drinks felt, as dramatic as it sounds, like self-betrayal.” More optimistically: “we can find authenticity within the very act of curation: in recognising that we will, inevitably, change and in trying to change thoughtfully, for the better.”
One student from the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) unearthed the digital subculture of Sydney’s young creatives on Instagram. “It’s very intense,” she tells me. “A lot of students use our social media as portfolios, but it can come off as quite performative to so distinctly label yourself as an artist, especially if it’s not dialled down with some more normal or personal content. We’re aware that potential industry contacts are looking at these pages, but so are our friends.” The student is in her third year and lives with a National Art School student (also third-year). She shares film projects as permanent posts and personal content in disappearing stories. “There’s definitely an element of curation that goes into choosing how you want to put yourself and your work out there, but at the end of the day, that’s creative freedom.” Is that the price we pay for self-determination?
Increasingly, art exhibitions are moving towards trends of self-curatorship, often digitally, rendering online personas all the more significant. According to creatives YuJune Park and Caspar Lam, “the post-pandemic world is one of ‘phygital’ spaces, augmented realities, and new experiments in the gallery-from-home experience”. They reveal that self-curated digital experiences are on the rise, and this could alter the boundaries between consumption of the artwork and the artist. In one piece from Infinite Scroll, Kyle Chayka shares that, “my online presence increasingly felt like a carefully crafted display of what I wanted to show off, rather than a reflection of my unfiltered curiosities. I accrued a reasonable number of Twitter followers and came to see tweeting as a professional necessity, part and parcel of building one’s ‘brand’.”
So what does all this preoccupation with self-curatorship and digital image do to our sense of identity? What is it like growing up in the age of the ‘“shadow self’”? Social psychologist Kenneth Gergen warned of “multiphrenia” — a technological saturation of the psyche to the point of complete fragmentation and loss of the individual. I was thirteen when I first downloaded Instagram and I calculate I’ve had around six different accounts since then: a personal account just for close friends, a larger account, an account for writing, an account for photography… The anxiety I felt to curate and present my fluid, developing identity in just the right way was apparent. I learned a lot about curating in my first formative Instagram years. I learned the words “vignette”, “archive”, and “aesthetic”. I learned the best kind of filters for different shots, the right time of day to feed the beastly algorithm. To give an adolescent, unsure of themselves and their place, a tool to express that to the world and their peers can offer salvation or destruction.
A new study, ‘The Psychophysiology of Instagram’, revealed that social media withdrawal symptoms mimic those associated with serious drug usage. However, there was a crucial difference. Observing 54 young people’s usage, it noted that unlike drugs, “social media taps into basic human needs: we all want to belong and to be liked”. Correcting the term “social media addiction” to simply “friendship addiction” as a way to normalise and destigmatise this phenomenon is to acknowledge that worrying over our digital appearance is standard. It is a quest for the validation that comes from being seen and affirmed. In any conversations about self-curatorship, we must remember that it is happening for the viewer on the other side of the screen. Thus, our self exploration exists not only in the bounds of our autonomy, but as a dynamic relationship pushing and pulling to satisfy the follower — our voyeur, our friend.
Self-curatorship, as a process of fragmenting and picking, is essentially an incomplete dream. When social media is used as a time-capsule for archived memories, there is a sense of fullness and access. However, just because this generation is more visually documented than ever before, does not mean it is a true way to store memories. Digital amnesia questions whether social media is really the right way to remember the development of the self. A friend of mine has Instagram highlight tracing back five years, organised thematically. She shared, “When I can’t quite remember what happened during a certain time period, I know I can scroll back far enough and get a semi-manufactured glimpse into my reality at the time. Whether this is a feature of digital technology or a progressive corruption of my own working memory is the question. The problem is, the digital is vulnerable.”
I am fortunate I will likely only ever have to worry about how to use social media to document myself — unlike the hundreds of thousands in other parts of the world using it to document the destruction of their worlds, homes, and families. I am fortunate to feel creeping anxieties over my very ordinary Instagram page. If you go there now, you can see a smug photo of me in a black wool turtleneck and skirt smiling into the Verge Gallery headphones, listening to my writing, and deduce what choice was made.
