How social media platforms use data to tell us who we should be

Our Profile(d) Selves

Celebrating the new possibilities that digital media have given us to present and express ourselves, should not also prevent us from reflecting on their limitations and why these limits are imposed. Through data analytics, social media platforms use our profiles to profile us. They encourage us to be a lot and one at the same time, to constantly share ever more details of our lives that could be combined into a single customer profile. Crafting our abundant and anchored selves in accordance to this datafication logic may work well for some of us, at some times. We may like to express a lot of information about ourselves and it may be more comfortable for us to use one profile to log in to other social media, rather than creating yet another profile. However, when datafication logic becomes an unwritten fundamental principle behind our digital selves, it turns into a straitjacket, as in the case of some LGBTQ refugees, which stifles the more fragmented and contradictory ways in which we might prefer to present and express ourselves in different digital environments and for different audiences.