The Id, Ego, and Super-ego of Social Media

One of the things I remember from Psych 7 class in college is the model of the id, ego, and super-ego. First a lesson from Wikipedia, the id is described as:

amoral and egocentric, ruled by the pleasure–pain principle; it is without a sense of time, completely illogical, primarily sexual, infantile in its emotional development, and will not take “no” for an answer. It is regarded as the reservoir of the libido or “instinctive drive to create”.

The ego is the mediator between the id and super-ego and:

separates what is real. It helps us to organise our thoughts and make sense of them and the world around us.

Lastly, the super-ego:

strives to act in a socially appropriate manner, whereas the id just wants instant self-gratification. The Super-ego controls our sense of right and wrong and guilt. It helps us fit into society by getting us to act in socially acceptable ways

What I recognize is this id, ego, and super-ego construct in relation to my personal social media outlets. I definitely have to say that my social media id is Pulpconnection.net. Everything about the id and its pleasure principle is probably contained within this blog. I freely talk about anything on this blog and have been known to “spit the truth.”

My social media ego equivalent is probably Twitter. The short bursts of tweets about news and conversations do help make sense of the virtual and physical world around me. And in Twitter, what I tweet are expressions of “I myself,” the pure definition of ego.

Lastly, my super-ego representation has to be Facebook. The super-ego acts as the conscious, just as Facebook does for me, probably because real names are used. Although my tweets and blog posts are fed into Facebook, I selectively add other components to my Facebook profile balancing the urges of my id and the realities of my ego.

So there you have it, my id, ego, and super-ego of social media. What are yours?