If You Can Make Yourself Here You Can Make Yourself Anywhere: Exploring the praxis of the ethical-self in New York City meatspace through social media

This project seeks to answer the question: 'In what ways do New Yorkers create themselves as ethical in the meatspace through social media?' As online spaces pullulate in today's world, this research considers how the ethical self, highly significant in the context of New York, interacts with social media, allowing me to complexify considerations of online behaviour. Taking the

ethical-self as 'an active relation between my actual self and a vision of my ideal self' (Noddings, 2013), we can question how social media acts as a space in which we both can present as our ethical-selves, and become conscious of, and interact more with, our ideal-self. My work examines both how this relationship forms online, and how social media enables the ethical-self

to manifest in 'meatspace'. In a novel turn for digital anthropology, this project uses the term 'meatspace' as an alternative to the 'digital' or 'non-digital', a boundary which is increasingly blurred (Boellstorff, 2021). 'Meatspace', the space in which we are physical-weighted beings, allows me to consider this liminality between digital and non-digital spaces.

This project contributes to digital and moral anthropology. Morality features in digital anthropology, which considers the ways moral norms permeate social media usage (Sinanan, 2017). Meanwhile, moral anthropology is interested in the ideal self, so naturally comes into conversation with the processes through which identity is crafted on/via social media. Engaging

with moral and digital anthropology deters us from considering online behaviour as simply the 'performance of identity', instead we understand this behaviour as 'the ongoing experience of shaping the ethical-self' (Cook, 2010. pp.14). This project contributes to the dilemma of digital anthropology that individuals online 'portray themselves in multiple ways' (Sinanan, 2017 pp.

8), by considering why and how individuals are choosing to portray themselves in the way they do, considering it ethical work.