What’s on your mind? This is a golden question that millions and millions of people encounter everyday, an iconic written prompt that serves to guide them before they start typing away on the keyboards of their devices. From status updates, profile “bios” to making a public post, the act of writing online can feel like a design process in and of itself: we engage in an ideation session based on a given topic, sketch and document our generated ideas, delve into writing several rough drafts, go into recurring cycles of editing to make sure that the final version of the writing is most relevant and captures our desired tone and original intentions, and finally, hitting the “publish” button where the writing then surfaces as the final product of our craft.

But the process is rarely as easy as it sounds. I often struggle to write a short statement about myself because the statements always seem to exist as a disjointed identity of myself — in blurbs like “I’m a linguistics student and an avid food recipe explorer, with an interest in professional opportunities in the communications sector”, I still feel a much heavier inclination to write for the appeal of a certain audience, which sometimes further increase the sentiments that these are the traits that others would desire in, rather than personal goals that I genuinely want to achieve. Furthermore, considering the “openness” and ease of access of content that are posted on digital platforms, there is also an underlying expectation that one should write in a way that effectively conveys their personalities in a unique and natural manner, without sounding overly deliberate. This problem is even more prevalent on business-oriented networking sites, as every word in the “about” section can potentially make or break others’ impressions of you when they browse through your personal profile. The process of writing about oneself ironically disengages my existing understanding of my own identity.

Example of a LinkedIn profile's About Section: Storytelling of Self-identity

In Theresa Sauter’s What’s on your mind?’ Writing on Facebook as a tool for self-formation, Sauter proposes that writing serves as a tool for an individual to formulate their own identity, a process that she introduces as “self-formation”. She references Foucault’s argument that “writing is thus a technique of self [...] – a way to talk about and reveal oneself, to engage with oneself and others and to present and perform oneself to an audience” (Sauter 826). Writing about the self allows individuals to understand their relationships with oneself by exposing their thoughts and sentiments outwardly to the public. When we document and assemble words together for social media posts, we are conducting a kind of performative art where we formulate an ongoing narrative piece by piece (I think writing is in fact our “performative voice”). Every post, biography or status update we make acts as fragments of our personal stories, each of them helping to piece together a somewhat coherent display or performance of who we are as an individual, in others’ perspectives.

In a later section, Sauter uses status updates of SNS users as an example to introduce the idea of how these updates allow the users to make accessible and explicit their process of self formation. She argues that the status updates allow individuals to “reflect on their conduct and interact with others in order to navigate social norms of acceptable conduct” (Sauter 834).

I was browsing through my past Facebook posts, and found one of them that was posted in 2014 and particularly stuck out to me. I remember that I have made this post at an emotional peak amidst an elementary school drama that turned out to be nothing much really, but looking at this post, I was definitely putting a part of my vulnerable self on the public table. The first sentence “I always screw things up” demonstrate that I have actively reflected on my careless character, and by writing “people are going to hate me now” in the second sentence, I was not only articulating my inner feelings of regret, but this statement also shows that I was indirectly asking for others’ forgiveness, and in doing so, involving the potential referee in question while attempting to uphold the social norms of what would be deemed acceptable when an individual has done something wrong.

My Facebook status update, a form of reflection

This post, as well as the idea of self formation through writing on digital platforms reminded me of Roman Jakobson (a Russian-American linguist)’s language model that I had learned about in my linguistic anthropology class last semester. Out of the six different functions of the model, this post would have a referential function: it simultaneously highlights information about me as the writer, but it also refers to a context that is external to the message that it contains. The post also has an emotive/expressive function, as its content helps convey the writer’s feelings of sadness and upset. Thus, in this case, the act of writing about my emotions for a referenced situation on Facebook allows the language’s functions to be mobilized successfully. More importantly, the activity provides me with the opportunity to advance my self-formation, as I unfold my vulnerabilities to the public light and come to honest terms with the conflict that existed in one of the relationships I had with my friend.

Roman Jakobson's "Functions of Language" model

Going back to my initial observations, I noticed that there was a kind of “bio-evolution” that took place in my online writing endeavors; whereas I mostly wrote about my stories and experiences in school and with friends in the past, a large majority of writing of the self now takes form in short introductory statements that aim to give an overview of who I am, both personally and professionally. As Sauter puts it, these are not necessarily set-in-stone changes of states, but they are documented proofs of my ongoing self-formation process after all — different fragments of what’s on my mind.


Thank you for stopping by, for the last time. Although we may lose contact temporarily, please feel free to send me a message anytime through the Deep Space Network (DSN), as I will be visiting and exploring different planets within cyberspace. I should be able to receive some signal still. :-]


Sincerely,
Joyce Leung



References:

Frost, Aja. 13 Creative LinkedIn Summary Examples & How to Write Your Own. HubSpot Blog, 29 Jan. 2021, blog.hubspot.com/sales/linkedin-summary-examples.

Hébert, Louis. “The Functions of Language.” Roman Jakobson : The Functions of Language / Signo - Applied Semiotics Theories, www.signosemio.com/jakobson/functions-of-language.asp#:~:text=Jakobson's%20model%20of%20the%20functions,code%20and%20(6)%20message.

Sauter, Theresa. “‘What’s on Your Mind?’ Writing on Facebook as a Tool for Self-Formation.” New Media & Society, vol. 16, no. 5, 2013, pp. 823–839., doi: 10.1177/1461444813495160.


Media:

Frost, Aja. 13 Creative LinkedIn Summary Examples & How to Write Your Own. HubSpot Blog, 29 Jan. 2021, blog.hubspot.com/sales/linkedin-summary-examples.

Strader, Scott D. Roman Jakobson's Functions of Language. 5 Oct. 2014, www.scottdstrader.com/blog/ether_archives/001992.html.