Extended Self and Digital World Essay PDF

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Extended Self and Digital World: Identity is crucial and you must know who you are as a unique individual and how you fir into a greater society. Identity is based on the self. William James in 1890 stated that ‘the self is the sum total of all he can call his, his psychic powers, his clothes , his ancestors, his family’ You can have multiple selves such as social self, ideal self, actual self and they can be conflicting. There is also the Extended Self: Extended self was proposed by Belk (1988) as knowingly, unknowingly, intentionally, or unintentionally we regard our possessions as a part of ourselves. However over years it was formulated and many technological changes have affected the way we consumer, present ourselves and communicate. Since the extended self, there have been five changes in the Digital age outlined by Belk (2013). Three ways of incorporating posessions into the Extended Self as cited in Belk (1988) by sartre -Appropriating or controlling an object for personal use such as driving a car for the first time and controlling it does it become a part of our extended self -Second way of having a possession incorporated into self is by creating it/buying it. When you stand infront of objects with money in your pocket, the objects displayed are already more than half of yours -Third way is buy knowing them and buy inspiring the desire to have the object 5 Changes of the extended self in a Digital Age: 1-Dematerilization of possessions. Loss of physical body 2-Re-embodiment is not only have we lost the physical body of possessions but also loss of physical bodies and have considerable leeway in our virtual self presentation 3-Sharing is having sites where we share everything from clothes through rental sites such as Designer wardrobe to creating deceptions of our lives through the sharing of photos through sites such as Instagram etc Once semi-private now is public presentation and the more followers of people you don’t know follow you the more you are perceived better and often people have the idea of a person who shares these amazing photos and life etc as their ‘ideal self’ 4-Co-construction of self: Technology and the digital age helping reconstruct our identity and joint extended sense of self, inviting comments and likes which social media thrives on such interaction 5-Distributed Memory: Technology allows for an extended archive of individual and collective autobiography issues...