When you’re a kid, you’re allowed to change your mind: green can be your favorite color on Wednesday, but it’s perfectly acceptable for you to have declared your loyalties to blue by Thursday. In adulthood, however, picking favorites is trickier:
Though picking favorites seems to be a fairly childish endeavor, it is an act that shapes one’s identity through a lifetime, giving both friends and strangers and insight into one’s tastes and, to a certain extent, personality (or an attempt to appear to have one) via a chosen set of music, clothing, films, etc. But it’s not just our public devotion to something that gives others a view into our private lives; it’s also our public dismissal of things we used to hold dear. The advent of social networking has made the act of declaring—and then dropping—favorites an incredibly public one: bands you may have claimed undying loyalty to on your Facebook page in 2007 may eventually become an embarrassment of sorts by 2010, and when you make a change to your “likes and interests” it’s a quiet way of admitting to everyone on your friends list that you’ve made a personal change—if even a slight one— in how you view the world in general. There is a strange fluidity of identity that comes along with social networking: we are able to change our favorite things with a click, constantly evolving as the years go by, even if the basic structure of our profile stays the same. And though it may seem as easy as switching from Team Green to Team Blue, it requires an effort that reminds the user of the person they were when they first listed a certain band, or book, or film, and there is a bit of letting go required in dropping old loves and declaring one’s devotion to something new. You can change who you are and how you view things, both online and off, but you have to physically erase your past before you can move on.
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