Back to the Future: Myspace and Gen Z Digital Identity

When Zuck famously — and  wrongly  — declared: “Having two identities for yourself is a lack of integrity” we got locked into a single static account, desperate for dynamism and more nuanced expr ession.

Our innate desire for personality multiplicity thrashed against the restrictions of claustrophobic profiles.

This underscores a major difference between Millennials and Gen Zs: the former group was taught to burnish their online presence, using every opportunity to stand out and look perfect; the latter group, which has never known a world without social media, prefers blending in and trying on new identities.

Flexible digital identities. Gen Zers are online constantly but have different preferences across platforms/friend groups about how they want to “show up” digitally. The rise of “Finsta” accounts is one good example of this. Companies like Facemoji already help users create social content using a curated digital avatar — we’re excited to see what e... See more

The Era Of Multiple Identities: We Discover, Embrace, & Express Our Multiple Selves -> From networks like Discord, where users are represented by whatever name and avatar they choose, and ItsMe, where people connect in real-time using a creative avatar of their choosing, we’re seeing huge growth in willingness to engage, transact with, and befriend... See more

it’s a directionally correct generalization, and it’s showing itself in where and how people interact online. Many young people prefer the facelessness of Discord, Reddit, a crypto pfp. With the rise of privacy online—both anonymity and pseudonymity—we’ll see more people express themselves through new personas that obscure their “real” identity.

a g... See more

maybe here, we do have an aesthetic counter to the wallflower non-style of Big Tech: a raging messy semiotic meltdown of radicalizing (if absurdist) meme culture where the only ideological no-go zone is the liberal center. Key here is that most of this activity is happening under the guise of avatars, pseudonyms, and collectively run social media a

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