Cosplaying a False Reality

Multiple Identities + Technology = Not Reality

I remember when my son was about seven years old. He was a cute little brown boy. He has a female cousin that was the same age. They always played together and even cried when they had to leave each other. One day, my son came to my wife (his mother) and stated confidently, “When my cousin and I grow up, we are getting married!” My wife laughed.

She came and told me. I thought, what in the Amish?

My wife told him gently, “You cannot marry your first cousin. You can love her like a sister but you cannot marry her.” With tears in his eyes, he asked, “Whyyyyyy?”

We tell American kids all the time, you can do anything you want and be anything you want to be. This message is being marketed to adolescents from every corner of American culture—graduations, commercials, music, films, social media, etc. Growing up, I believed it. But not anymore. The Bible doesn't support this so I tell my kids something different. I will come back to this story.

Does Marketing Cause Fragmentation?

Because we live in a consumer society, marketing messages are everywhere. At the basic psychological level, marketing is a process of performance and a promise. It demonstrates the value, purpose and functionality of a product/service through its messaging and visuals. Using marketing channels (print, television, internet, etc.), an emotional connection and trust is built based on shared values with a specific audience. Since the advent of the internet, these messages have increased online creating more visual noise.

So, who is the connection and trust built with? The self.

The 1980s was called the 'Me Decade’ for a reason with Boomers and Gen X focused on self esteem, self-improvement, health and fitness. America was evolving from a mass media culture governed by television to a niche marketing culture that included print, television, cable, radio and film. The primary emphasis driving American culture was consumerism which began to tap into the psychology of the self: who we are, our self-esteem and self-image. Researchers coined the term self-concept and began to study it as far back as 1979. According to positivepsychology.com, American social psychologist Roy Baumeister defines self-concept as follows:

“The individual’s belief about himself or herself, including the person’s attributes and who and what the self is.”

PositivePsychology.com says that self-concept is an overarching idea we have about who we are—physically, emotionally, socially, spiritually. It evolves through our experiences influenced by social and environmental factors. Self-concept affects how we communicate and how we view our achievements.

Since we are influenced by the things happening around us, it is fair to say that we are impacted by the rising visual noise in our consumer society as well. Have you been to Times Square in New York City at night? Who can even focus?

Times Square…the epitome of visual noise.

When in a large American city, we are forced to endure visual noise that perform for us and promise excitement and happiness in very specific areas. With the rise of what I call Adjective Marketing on the internet, this has gotten worse. Cyberspace has created new marketing tools by placing a word in front of marketing to identify its strategy for a target audience. Here is a list: Push marketing, Pull Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Viral Marketing and SMS Marketing. By the way, there are more! They all have similarities but each tool allows the marketer to hypertarget. In my graphic design practice, I have used all of them except Influencer Marketing. (I didn’t believe it works but you will see later that I was wrong.)

As consumerism and the internet continues to intrude into our lives and provide new multiple forms of identity exploration, we fragment ourselves and are in danger of taking on the characteristics of a brand focused on performance and promise.

The Adoration of the Golden Calf by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665).

Idolatry as Trauma Expression

In the Book of Exodus, Moses was sent to release his people (the Israelites) from Pharaoh’s oppression and remind them of who they are: God’s people. YHWH made a promise to their ancestors (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) that he plans to keep. Once the Israelites left Egypt, they crossed the Red Sea and evenutally Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. Yet in Exodus 20:18-21 when YHWH wanted to come to meet with the people, the thunder, lightning and smoke billowing from the mountain frightened them. They told Moses to speak to God and kept their distance. Their fearful response in this passage should not shock you. Although the Israelites feared God (Ex. 1:17), they were not accustomed to God speaking directly to them until Moses. Between the time of Joseph’s death and Moses’ leadership, there are no Bible verses indicating that God spoke directly to the Israelites. Although we can easily focus this lack of communication on YHWH, this would not be in keeping with his character that we see starting in the Book of Genesis. It most likely highlights an inconvenient truth: The Israelites feared God but DID NOT know his voice.

Overtime, oppression and sin has this effect. It slowly makes you forget who God is and who you truly are. God sees the Israelites as his children so he starts rebuilding their culture by being present and giving them laws. But their tepid response shows that they struggled to believe they were actually the children of God.

Starting with Adam and Eve in Genesis, YHWH sets the stage for wanting to dwell with his people. Dwell in Hebrew means to sit or settle down. The meaning implies presence and permanence. Jesus understood this idea and said in Revelation 3:20, Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me. After the Israelites refused to meet with YHWH, He instructs them to erect a tent (tabernacle) in Exodus 25 so he can settle down with them. YHWH also gave specific instructions on how to prepare for his presence by the constructing the ark where his presence would dwell. Later in 2 Samuel, God told the prophet Nathan to give King David instructions on building the Temple. Eventually David’s son, Solomon, built it.

But in spite of this, the Israelites are prone to commit idolatry throughout the Old Testament.

I would like to submit the idea that idolatry is a trauma response to not knowing WHO God is and WHO we are. We react to this distress by giving our energies to what is familiar, popular and comfortable instead of what is unique, sacred and requires faith. This means that the sinful desires in our hearts is common to every human, is recognizable and feels natural. When we do not know who God is and who we are, Satan exploits this by nudging us towards performance and promise giving us the allusion of control and away from YHWH’s presence and permanence. He tried to do the same thing to Jesus in the wilderness in Matthew 4. The Accuser tempted him to perform and promised him the world if he bowed down to him. He wanted Jesus to abandon being the Son of God. Jesus responded with the Word of God. Satan lost!!

In ancient times, the Israelites made idols or borrowed them from the surrounding cultures even though YHWH told them not to do this. In our modern times, we have idol producing industries that are far more sophisticated than what we read in the Old Testament or what Apostle Paul encountered in Ephesus in Acts 19:23-41. But the result is the same: We are encouraged to replace God and become something we were never meant to be.

You Are the Product

In the 2006, the MacArthur Foundation launched a five-year $50 million digital media and learning initiative to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people, learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life. I obtained several of these research reports and utilized them in my graduate studies on adolescents and the internet. They also helped me develop Media & Culture classes at a small Christian private high school for African American students where I was an administrator and teacher.

Young People, Ethics and the new Digital Media was published in 2009. In this report, the researchers stated that the internet allowed adolescents to freely test and experiment with new identities in a low-stakes environment. Although offline they experimented with clothing and hairstyle changes, the researchers believed they were constrained since enrichment opportunities were disappearing for them. One example would be if a teen wanted to be a dancer and there were no dance studios nearby. Contrast this with going online and adopting a name such as ‘fundancer’, posting an avatar of a dancing bear and videos of the young person dancing. American sociologist Sherry Turkle waa part of this report and believed that the internet provided fertile space for identity exploration because youth would be freed from the physical, social and economic restraints of offline life.

However, this report also highlight the perils of virtual identity exploration.

Here we are in 2025 and this statement above has been a self fulfilling prophecy. It has been made exponentially worse by the addictiveness baked into smartphones and apps.

Performance and promise, although foundational in the psychology of marketing, is at the very root of idolatry because it aggressively encourages us to commoditize the self. Our consumer driven society with all its visual noise tempts us, especially adolescents, to function like a thing that is the sum total of its desires and treat others that way. We masquerade as something else online addicted to feedback (likes and shares). Then, in the name of individual self-expression, we bring these consumer identities into the real world seeking attention. Being human should not be solely about performance. God designed our souls (mind, body and spirit) to simply BE the glorious Imago Dei and to EXPRESS that. When we go beyond this to always performing, we begin to lack the ability to be self aware, our connection to God dissipates and this pushes us toward individual self-expression and narcissism. When we become idolaters, it is easy to become…the product. The logical outcome is your own private hell full of instability and mental health challenges because you cannot understand why everyone doesn't like you.

When I study idolatry in the Bible, this idea of performance and promise show themselves in several verses:

Performance (Demonstrating value, purpose and functionality)

When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.
Exodus 32:5-6

While Israel was staying in Shittim, the men began to indulge in sexual immorality with Moabite women, who invited them to the sacrifices to their gods. The people ate the sacrificial meal and bowed down before these gods.
Numbers 25:1-2

The Israelites secretly did things against the Lord their God that were not right. From watchtower to fortified city they built themselves high places in all their towns. They set up sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree. At every high place they burned incense, as the nations whom the Lord had driven out before them had done. They did wicked things that aroused the Lord’s anger.
2 Kings 17:9-11

Promise (Creating an emotional connection and building trust)

For these are rebellious people, deceitful children,
children unwilling to listen to the Lord’s instruction.
They say to the seers,
“See no more visions!”
and to the prophets,
“Give us no more visions of what is right!
Tell us pleasant things,
prophesy illusions.
Leave this way,
get off this path,
and stop confronting us
with the Holy One of Israel!”
Isaiah 30:9-11

“Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them.”
Jonah 2:8

^“There is danger not only that our trade will lose its good name, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be discredited; and the goddess herself, who is worshiped throughout the province of Asia and the world, will be robbed of her divine majesty.”
Acts 19:27

Cosplaying Identities

The story of my son in the first part of this article has slightly more to it. I realized that he assumed that his relationship with his cousin was EXACTLY like me and his mother’s relationship. I explained the importance of presence and permanence in marital intimacy without making him vomit. My wife and I weren’t alarmed—we were amused. We responded to his naivete with reality and truth and also told him he can still be WHO God intended him to be—not do anything he wants and be anything he wants to be! What concerns me today is that most of the messages adolescents are receiving about this false reality is mainly coming from amateur and professional influencers:

1. Individuals performing on the internet for likes (money/sponsorship) and attention.

2. Individuals promising something through their short videos hoping to go viral.

We need to admit that we all are tempted to cosplay a false reality manufactured from our perceptions and desires. We don’t need the internet to do this but unfortunately it makes idolatry look easy and cool. Jesus’ preparation for Satan’s wiles was to block out all distractions and be fully present with the Father through fasting. All humans seek to be known, valued and respected. But Jesus did not seek unhealthy 24/7 attention from people. Even though he was without sin, he sought the Father's presence first which puts all other human pursuits and desires in perspective. He set an example for us, we should imitate this and teach adolescents as well.

Let’s keep ourselves in God’s love as we wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring us to eternal life. Let’s be merciful to those who doubt; save others by snatching them from the fire… (Jude 1:21-23a)

Robert Robinson wrote a popular Christian hymn Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing in 1757 at 22 years old. Although he wandered from his faith later in life, a young woman used this hymn to encourage him to return to the Lord. Here are the last few verses:

Prone to wander, Lord I feel it
Prone to leave the God I love

Here's my heart Lord, take and seal it
Seal it for Thy courts above

Here's my heart Lord, though it's weakened
Hold me in Your precious arms