Raymi The Minx: Lauren White and Online Identities

When Facebook took off around 2007, users created photo albums around particular nights, particular vacations, particular themes. Each album could tell a story or present a certain aspect of that user’s persona or life. Toronto life-blogger Lauren White, however, had been publicizing all those elements of her life well before Mark Zuckerberg’s Ivy League social network exploded. Since 2000, she’s been blogging almost daily as Raymi the Minx, a burlesque-dancing socialite and general woman about town. Her writing is sharp and full of attitude, her pictures stylish (and often of her.) It’s a persona that has garnered a wide range of followers, including some vocal detractors that find what they see to be vanity or narcissism off-putting. She shares so much of herself that the persona and the narrative presented through her blog has essentially overtaken her real life; the distinction between the two has become blurred. “Everything that happens here is going to go over there,” she told Ramona in her chat with rdigitaLife. “ I’m constantly thinking about it, I dream about it, I have nightmares, I have anxiety, I check my rank every day like stocks.” Increasingly, our identities are becoming defined by who we are online. What we like, what we Tweet, what we discuss is available through our many social networks. As Alice Marwick discussed yesterday, social media allows anyone to grab their little slice of notoriety, to be come a “cewebrity.” So is White’s compulsive blogging really an outlier, or just a precursor to the way we live on social media today? Watch her interview with Ramona and check out her bio.