Authenticity, is tossed around a lot in my generation’s culture, specifically if someone is being true on their social media about their lives or is it a skewed perspective they are showing. This obsession with authenticity leads to a never ending comparison between yourself and a profile. But is our identities online different from our physical Identities?

As defined by the American Psychological Association, "Identity is (a) a set of physical, psychological, and interpersonal characteristics that is not wholly shared with any other person and (b) a range of affiliations (e.g., ethnicity) and social roles. Identity also has to do with a feeling of continuity that a person is the same person they were yesterday. This sense is derived from a set of values, goals, memories and expectations that belong to one’s self."  There is a few aspects we cannot change about our identities like race, parents, where we grew up. But part of our identity is choices we make like the clothing we choose to wear, what we chose to study in school, who we form relationships with.

Since a part of identity is defined by our decisions, I chose to focus on the choices I make about my social media. This is where my data sets were derived from. Each of the data sets cover different aspects of choice in social media, audience, content/curation, and tracked data. I pulled all of my data from my own personal Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. I chose these three social medias because not only was I the most active on them, but also they are among the most commonly used social medias.