lwatson's posterous

Cooley's looking glass self.

Last year I did SOCI102 and Cooley was one of the theriosts we studied and now after briefly talking about it in class I can see how relivent it is when thinking about online verus offline indentities, and wish I had known this last year and could have used it as an example! Anyway I think this whole idea of the 'looking glass self' is so relivent when looking at how people constuct themselves from how they see themselves online. From my old notes to put the idea simply the looking glass self is made up of three components:

  1. We imagine how we must appear to others.
  2. We imagine the judgement of that appearance.
  3. We develop our self through the judgments of others.

Cooley talks about how we do this in everday life right from a very young age and dont even realise we are doing it. We construct ourselves so we can seem appealing to others, or how we imagine would be appealing to others. Online your image is completely constructed there is no backstage showing, everyting online is carefully construsted. All photos have to go through a process of being uploaded in which then they are filted through. Meeting someone in real life you have to worry about how you look right then and there and imagine there judgement and try to manage how they view you which isn't always successfull. Where as online that is easy because everything has to be constructed by someone and you can view yourself (well your page) just as someone else would view it. This you cannot do in everyday life as you can't really see yourself in all situations, you have to imagine it, but online eveything you do is on a screen so you can watch yourself as if you are someone else.

To Posterous, Love Metalab