You are not a brand

MANILA, Philippines - If you’ve been people watching in the last five years, chances are you’ve met someone who wouldn’t drink a martini or go with you to watch Harry Potter or dig through clothes in Surplus Shop because it doesn’t “fit” his or her “brand.”

Pretentious people have been around since the dawn of time, but the lure of Internet fame seems to have attracted a new breed of people who refer to themselves as “brands” instead of “people.” Never before has public image been so easy to manipulate both by outsiders (i.e. the media) and by the imagined (i.e. the person to be considered by an audience).

It’s called image crafting, and it’s become almost effortless to project an ideal image of yourself to others. For example, by constantly updating your social media accounts with “cool, respectable things” that you, the aspiring brand, would do — traveling, watching a foreign film, hiking Mt. Pulag, drinking fancy coffee — and leaving out the “normal, slightly embarrassing things” that You, the Actual Person, might still enjoy doing — reading Pretty Little Liars, taking a trillion Photobooth selfies, wearing flip-flops with jeans — you create your own persona, the person you hope to become, or at least, the person you hope others see when they see you. You turn yourself into a brand.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with self-editing or choosing not to post 24/7, a deliberate skewing of your personality can be a little disingenuous, and a little manipulative. After all of the editing, the tweaking and the whittling down, how much of the real “you” is even left in what you introduce to people?

This is a whole new level of keeping up appearances, and while that could be a recipe for success (possibly the short-lived Internet kind), it can be problematic because you’re projecting only a version of yourself.

When you have to pause to consider if you, the brand, would normally do something before actually doing it, then you are not being true or fair to you, the person. I have been active online since the sixth grade, in 1999. I lived through Y2K, scrolling text abuse, and rainbow links. Back then, the Internet was vastly different.

You went online to find kindred spirits who were into the same nerdy things you were into, or because you didn’t have an outlet, or because you didn’t have anywhere else to go, really. No one really put up blogs to be noticed; handles and vague usernames existed for a reason. No one really spun themselves a fake story with a fake personality to go with it, and very rarely did people use their real names as their usernames because it was considered unsafe and somewhat creepy. When people found out that you’d been lying about yourself and who you were, you were practically crucified for it. (I actually had a friend from LiveJournal who faked her own death and got caught. You can imagine the shitstorm that followed.)

These days, you can actually have a say in how you want people to perceive you, which, by most counts, is a great thing. But the focus of being on the Internet seems to have shifted greatly from just interacting with people to just being seen doing stuff. It’s like the Internet has become a way to legitimize your coolness to the world. After all, did it really happen if it’s not immortalized on Instagram?

Of course, this isn’t true for everyone. There are still many people who have embraced the late ‘90s, early 2000s’ battle cry and have decided to “keep it real.” There are still people who think of themselves as people, not brands. There are still people who do things for the things themselves, and not for attention or fame or “brand development.”

These people understand what it means to be true to yourself — that every part of a person makes him or her inimitable. Special. Unlike any other. In the end, the best identity your brand could ever aspire to have is your own. What you get in return for being a genuine person is genuine interest in you (unless you are a d-bag who sucks), the person, instead of a bunch of meaningless comments and likes who approve of you, the brand, who could turn out to be someone you may not even really be.