La Voz de Galicia – Decembre 13, 2024 →
The other day, I was talking with a friend about how curious it is to get to know the “other side” of people. In some way, we are all multiple personas throughout our lives—even within a single day. And for those with public-facing jobs, there’s always a public life and a private life, and the way one behaves shifts depending on the context.
We were discussing a specific setting, which is the performing arts world, where the public life of its protagonists is so public that people around them tend to behave differently than they would with someone without such a public profile. We talked about the varying treatment this entails and what happens when someone steps away from that public life or circuit. But the more we talked, the more I realized that today, without even noticing, most of the population already has a public persona, thanks to social media, and the way we interact there can be quite different from from how we relate to others in person.
For better or worse, the “other side” of people is more visible than ever. We present ourselves with filters on social media and without filters in person—but also sometimes with filters in daily life and without filters online. Without realizing it, we read insults, opinions, and comments daily that likely would never be said face-to-face—and they do affect us in some way. I think learning how to exist and interact is much more complicated today than it was during my childhood. Although I’m not a parent, when I think about all of this, I imagine how difficult it must be to navigate adolescence while trying to dodge the kind of violence that, through social media, arrives uncontrollably from all sides.
