So You've Been Publicly Shamed

There's a term that gets bandied about a lot in conversations about social media that I find particularly grating: personal branding. The idea behind personal branding is that we need to market ourselves, to create a persona, to hide behind a crafted veneer, when we engage with others online; it is the notion that if everything we say and do can be interpreted in many ways, we need to ensure that everything we do and say is crafted so conspicuously and consciously that there is only one way to interpret it, and that interpretation builds some kind of “brand equity.”

In essence, personal branding is a function of feeling as though, if everything we do and say is being watched, we should be putting on a such a show that it ensures that the watchers are pleased.

There is a certain blandness that comes from the idea of personal branding; in an effort to never offend, we hide that which makes us interesting. I'm not arguing that we must be offensive, of course, but what I do miss is the ability to be ourselves and make mistakes, to acknowledge that we aren't perfect and that we are flawed, and not have those mistakes define who we are.

There's a sentence towards the end of Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed that resonated with me:

“We are creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.”

“I used to worry that I bared my feelings too readily, too voluminously; more recently, when I'm thinking about them at all, I worry that I don't show them nearly enough.”

(Originally published on I Tell Stories.)