“Identity was no longer assigned but became a project for individuals to realize. It became an opportunity and a responsibility, a burden. You could now fail to become someone.” “This is the context in which social media have thrived: They solve the problem of the self under neoliberalism, extending a platform for human capital development while still offering a seemingly stable basis for “ontological security.” It may seem that social media, by making social interaction asynchronous, shifting a portion of it online to an indefinite “virtual” space, and subjecting it all to constant monitoring, measurement, and assessment would not be a recipe for producing a sense of personal continuity. The way our self-expression gets ranked in likes and shares in social media would seem to subordinate identity to competition over metricized attention, dividing peers into winners and losers. And the creation of identity in the form of a data archive would seem to fashion not a grounded self but an always incomplete and inadequate double — a “self partially forced from the body.” You are always in danger of being confronted with your incohesiveness, with evidence of a past self now rejected or a misinterpreted, misprocessed version of one’s archive being distributed as the real you. If Laing is right about ontological insecurity, then social media seem designed to generate it: They systematically impose a sense of insubstantiality on users, turning identity into incoherence by constantly assimilating and demanding more data about us, making our self a vacuum that never fills, no matter how much is poured in. Our identity is constantly being recalibrated and recalculated, and we can forever try to “correct” it with more photos, more updates, more posts, more data.” “...other forms of micro-recognition” “The profile takes over for the old identity stabilizers (family, geography, religion, etc.) and becomes the sturdy blank slate on which various roles can be inscribed while we remain open to the saturation of as many different influences as possible. It can hold our lives while we are busy constantly reinventing ourselves for labor markets. Social media exacerbate ontological insecurity while masquerading as its cure.”