Identity: A Look In The Mirror.

A few weeks ago, I started thinking about how technology has altered the fabric of who we are and the fact that it's happening faster than before. Some of this has been related to good products and arguably more of this has been related to really good marketing. Some products are good and stand on their own merit, some lack merit and compensate through marketing. Some are good and have good marketing, and so we go.

Who we are is largely communicated with what we identify with - be it as an 'early adopter who is cool' or 'someone who has no time'.

We sometimes change who we are based on what we identify with - because we want to be something, or perceived to be something by others.

Sometimes, some of us (if not all) pretend to be something that we identify with. Financially successful, babe magnets, or people who drink lots of beer without getting DUIs and beer bellies. Thin, happy, what have you - we see something that we want to be identified with and we attempt to be that which we wish to be identified with. 

We also reject what we do not identify with. Some of us go the extra mile and make fun of what we do not identify with - Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are brilliant examples of people who get paid for making fun of what they don't identify with because a lot of other people don't identify with the same things. Plus they're funny and have good writers.

Lastly - and perhaps least - we identify with what we actually are, with the person we see in the mirror every morning without illusion if we see that person at all.

It used to be that newspapers, television and fast talking salesmen were the vectors for these issues of identity that affect us every day. Now it's a lot more than that - it's the bombardments from cable television where some have more channels than healthy hair follicles, where advertising for just about anything is being targeted more and more toward who we think we are. That happens because in marketing surveys, people answer about themselves rarely because of who they actually are but who they believe themselves to be. The difference can vary from nothing to extremely large depending on the person.

And now we have removed that issue with the history that websites track. If you take a moment and look in your browser history, you may be surprised to see yourself as many online marketers do.

The question now, gentle reader, is whether you really are what's in your browser history. Take a moment and look. Take a moment and look over your social media interactions. Who is that person?

I, for one, am not so defined.But somewhere there's a bunch of statistics that my identity swims in, maybe with yours, that someone thinks represents me in entirety. Isn't that peculiar?