UNDERSTANDING THE SELF SEM 02 | 03

LECTURE / GEN ED AUF-CON

UTS MODULE 5 - MATERIAL AND DIGITAL SELF

OUTLINE
I Material Self
A Denis Diderot
B William James
i The Body, The Clothes, The Immediate Family,
The Home
C We are what we have
II Digital Self
A The Internet in the World
B Selective Self-presentation and Impression
Management
C Why Confess to Unseen and Anonymous Others
Online?
D Setting Boundaries to Your Online Self: Smart
Sharing
DISCUSSION PROPER
MATERIAL SELF
DIDEROT EFFECT
● Have your parents, at one point, ever bought
something, say a designer center table, from your
local shopping mall and returned home only to
realize how all the furniture in the living room looks
so old and dusty in comparison? Did they
immediately go back to the mall to buy a new rug
and an ornate vase, maybe also a couple of
upholstered pillows thrown in for good measure, to
complement the newly purchased item?
● If your answer to both is yes, then the so-called
"Diderot Effect," one of the most
commonly-experienced phenomena of
consumption out there, has already taken hold of
them.
DENIS DIDEROT
● Originally articulated through an essay entitled
"Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown" by
18th century French philosopher
● Suggests that one innocent purchase can
unexpectedly spiral into an endless cycle of
complementary consumption
○ The kind which preys on one's yearning for a
cohesive identity
● The think piece, which also doubles as a short story,
tells of Diderot's fictitious account of being gifted by
a friend with a beautiful dressing gown. Elated at
first about the new item, he later on realized that he
has developed a nagging urge to replace all his
material possessions back home, as they suddenly
begin to look and feel inferior to the gown in
question.
WILLIAM JAMES
● In his The Principles of Psychology in 1980, he
claimed that understanding the self can be
examined through its different components:
○ Its constituents, the feeling and emotions they
arouse – self-feelings
○ The actions to which they prompt –
self-seeking and self-preservation
● The constituents of the self are composed of the
material self, the social self, and the spiritual self
and the pure ego
● The material self is primarily about our bodies,
clothes, immediate family, and home
○ We are deeply affected by these things
because we have put much investment in
ourselves
1. THE BODY
● The innermost part of our material self
● Intentionally, we are investing in our bodies
● We are directly attached to this commodity that
we cannot live without
● We strive hard to make sure that this body
functions well
○ Any ailment or disorder directly affects us
● We do have certain preferential attachment or
intimate closeness to certain body parts because
of its value to us
● There were people who got their certain body parts
insured (e.g. Mariah Carey and her vocal cords)
2. THE CLOTHES
● Influenced by the “Philosophy of Dress” by Herman
Lotze, James believed that clothing is an essential
part of the material self
● Lotze in his book, Microcosmus, stipulates that “any
time we bring an object into the surface of our
body, we invest that object into the consciousness
of our personal existence taking in its contours to be
our own and making it part of the self”
● The fabric and style of the clothes we wear bring
sensations to the body to which directly affect our
attitudes and behavior

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 MODULE 5 - MATERIAL AND DIGITAL SELF
○ Thus, clothes are placed in the second
hierarchy of material self
● Clothing is a form of self-expression
3. THE IMMEDIATE FAMILY
● Our parents and siblings hold another great
important part of ourselves
○ What they do or become affects us
● We place huge investment in our immediate family
when we see them as the nearest replica of
ourselves
○ When an immediate family member dies,
part of ourselves dies too
○ When their lives are in success, we feel their
victories as if we are the one who won
○ In their failures, we are put to shame or guilt
4. THE HOME
● It is the earliest nest of our selfhood
○ It is where the heart is located
● Our experiences inside the home were recorded
and marked on particular parts and things in our
home
● Having self investment of self to things, made us
attached to those things
○ The more self-given to the particular thing,
the more we identify ourselves to it
● We also tend to collect and possess properties
○ The collection of different degrees of
investment of self, becomes part of the self
○ As James described himself: “a man’s self is
the sum total of all what he CAN call his”
○ Possessions become a part or an extension of
the self
WE ARE WHAT WE HAVE
● Russel Belk says that “… we regard our possessions
as part of ourselves. We are what we have and
what we possess.”
● The identification of the self to things started in our
infancy stage when we make a distinction among
self and environment and others who may desire
our possessions
● As we grow older, putting importance to material
possessions decreases
○ However, material possessions gain higher
value in our lifetime if we use material
possession to find happiness, associate these
things with significant events,
accomplishments, and people in our lives
● Examples of these are the chair in the dining room
on which the person is always seated, the chair will
be the constant reminder of the person seated
there
DIGITAL SELF
The number of people who are becoming more
●
active online continues to increase worldwide
It has only been 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee
●
made the World Wide Web available to the public,
but in that time, the Internet has already become
an integral part of everyday life for most of the
world’s population
○ The Philippines is among one of the countries
with the most active Internet users
THE INTERNET IN THE WORLD
● Almost two-thirds of the world’s population has a
mobile phone
● More than half of the world’s web traffic now comes
from mobile phones
More than half of all mobile connections around the
●
world are now “broadband.”
More than one in five of the world’s population
●
shopped online in the past 30 days
● Media users in the Philippines grew by 12 million or
25% while the number of mobile social users
increased by 13 million or 32%
● More than half the world now uses smartphones
○ In the Philippines, adolescents are among the
most avid users of the Internet
SELECTIVE SELF-PRESENTATION AND IMPRESSION
MANAGEMENT
● According to Goffman (1959) and Leary (1995),
self-presentation is the “process of controlling how
one is perceived by other people” and is the key to
relationship inception and development
● To construct positive images, individuals selectively
provide information about them and carefully cater
this information in response to other’s feedback
● Belk (2013) explained that sharing ourselves is no
longer new and has been practiced as soon as
human beings were formed
● DIGITAL DEVICES
○ Help us share information broadly, more than
ever before
● UPDATED VIA SOCIAL MEDIA
○ For those who are avid users of Facebook, it is
possible that their social media friends are
more updated about their daily activities,
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 MODULE 5 - MATERIAL AND DIGITAL SELF
connections, and thoughts than their
immediate families
○ Diaries that were once private or shared only
with close friends are now posted as blogs
which can be viewed by anyone
○ Facebook and other social media
applications are now a key part of
self-presentation for one-sixth of humanity
FEAR OF MISSING OUT
● Because of the conversion of private diaries into
public revelations of inner secrets, the lack of
privacy in many aspects of social media make the
users more vulnerable, leading to compulsively
checking newsfeed and continually adding tweets
and postings in order to appear active and
interesting
DISINHIBITION EFFECT
● One of the reasons for so much sharing and
self-disclosure online is the so-called “disinhibition
effect.”
● The lack of face-to-face gaze meeting, together
with feelings of anonymity and invisibility, gives
people the freedom for self-disclosure but can also
“flame” others and may cause conflict sometimes
○ The resulting disinhibition causes people to
believe that they are able to express their
”true self” better online than they ever could
in face-to-face contexts
● However, it does not mean that there is a fixed “true
self.” The self is still at work and we keep on
improving and developing ourselves every single
day
WHY CONFESS TO UNSEEN AND ANONYMOUS
OTHERS ONLINE?
● FOCAULT’S VIEW
○ Confessing our secret truths feels freeing,
even as it binds us in a guilt-motivated
self-governance born of a long history of
Christian and pre-Christian philosophies and
power structures
○ Confession, along with contemplation,
self-examination, learning reading, and
writing self-critical letters to friends, are a
part of the ”technologies of the self” through
which we seek to purge and cleanse
ourselves
● Despite the veil of invisibility, writers on the Internet
write for an unseen audience
○ Both the number and feedback of readers
provide self-validation for the writer and a
certain celebrity
● CONFESSIONAL BLOGS
○ May also be therapeutic for the audience to
read, allowing both sincere empathy and the
voyeuristic appeal of witnessing a public
confession
● Consequently, we should have a filtering system to
whatever information we share online, as well as to
what information we believe in, which are being
shared or posted by others online
● We should look at online information carefully
whether they are valid and true before believing
and promoting them
● In the same way, we should also think well before
we post or share anything online in order to
prevent conflict, arguments, and cyberbullying, and
to preserve our relationships with others
SMART SHAMING: SETTING BOUNDARIES TO
YOUR ONLINE SELF
● The following guidelines will help you share
information online in a smart way that will protect
yourself and not harm others. Before posting or
sharing anything online, consider the following:
○ Is this post/story necessary?
○ Is there a real benefit to this post? Is it funny,
warm-hearted, teachable – or am I just
making noise online without purpose?
○ Have we (as a family or parent/child)
resolved this issue? An issue that is still being
worked out at home, or one that is either
vulnerable or highly emotional, should not be
made public.
○ Is it appropriate? Does it stay within the
boundaries of our family values?
○ Will this seem as funny in 5, 10, or 15 years? Or
is this post better suited for sharing with a
small group of family members? Or maybe
not at all?
David, Navarro | CAHAYA 2025
REFERENCES
https://auf.instructure.com/courses/23853/discussio
n_topics/366761?module_item_id=1064170
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