Children are trained to curate public selves starting in middle school

Evidence

For several years, I have been teaching a university course called The Corporate Self, in which my students and I explore, among other things, the history and impacts of personal branding. In one class exercise, I ask the students, most of whom are in their early twenties, to locate their earliest memory of when the concept of being a brand was introduced to them. Many report that it started in middle school, when they were pushed to do certain extracurricular activities because it would “look good” to some amorphous audience down the road. Others recall stern parental lectures about the perils of incautious social media posts: everything you put online now, they were told, will be read by college admission officers and future employers, so be careful to curate and package yourself through their imagined eyes. Alice Marwick, in her book Status Update, refers to this as “The (Safe for Work) Self”—and some students have been trained to cultivate such a self well before they have any clue about what kind of work they want to be “safe” for. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 177

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s knowledge of self-branding and the commodified self; relates to Marwick’s Status Update.