Putting me first

Matthew Gilbert is pondering the meaning of life.

Matthew Gilbert wants to eat spaghetti with apple sauce.

Matthew Gilbert needs an antacid.

Ah, Facebook. That’s my name up there on the marquee! I get to craft a version of myself, editing the content before releasing it to the public. I am playing “Matthew Gilbert’’ online, creating a persuasive simulation for the benefit of my social network.

Since 2000, Larry David, co-creator of “Seinfeld,’’ has been playing “Larry David, co-creator of ‘Seinfeld’ ’’ on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.’’ Ted Danson and Richard Lewis have played versions of Ted Danson and Richard Lewis. And this season of “Curb’’ is the ne plus ultra of self-adaptation, as it ties a fake “Sein feld’’ reunion for NBC to the actual “Seinfeld’’ reunion on “Curb’’ in a knot so tight it’s hard to undo. Jerry playing “Jerry’’ thinking about playing “ ‘Jerry’ ’’ - it’s a nesting doll of selves.

At this cultural juncture, there’s something especially resonant about the art of self-adaptation. In a world obsessed with the Web and reality TV, celebrities are no longer the only ones who get to play themselves for an audience. What else is Facebook but a stage where we generate iterations of ourselves - constructed from our daily and our fantasy lives - for public consumption? My Facebook self is Matthew Gilbert-ish, just as Larry David’s “Curb’’ self is Larry David-ish, just as guests on “30 Rock’’ (Oprah Winfrey, Al Gore, Seinfeld) and “Entourage’’ (Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg) are them-ish. We approximate ourselves for the screen.

On Facebook, on MySpace, even on Twitter, we’re all little celebrities, writing our own celebrity profiles for our network of readers. Just as celebrities select which aspects of themselves to reveal to the press - and believe me, they rarely let anything but prefabricated stories and sentences slip out, no matter how much access a journalist gets - we tweet and Facebook very choice details and photos of ourselves. Our postings are like press releases. We’ve all learned to be our own PR agents, our own biographers, our own “people.’’ We get to control what we want to present. It’s the metaphor that Erving Goffman extended in his seminal 1959 sociology book, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’’: We’re all actors choosing our roles and our costumes for social situations, selling our self to others.

Larry David did not invent celebrity self-adaptation, of course, although since 2000 a number of celebrities have followed his lead, regularly playing versions of themselves on TV. Indeed, the decade that saw the boom in social networking has been a heyday of self as “self’’ on TV. Not counting guest spots by the likes of Kate Winslet and Daniel Radcliffe on “Extras,’’ the list includes “The Chris Isaak Show’’ in 2001, “Fat Actress’’ with Kirstie Alley in 2005, Tori Spelling’s “So NoTORIous’’ in 2006, and now “Sherri,’’ Sherri Shepherd’s new Lifetime sitcom based on her pre-“View’’ life.

They all owe a debt to Garry Shandling. First, with “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,’’ the Showtime series that ran from 1986-1990, Garry Shandling starred as “Garry Shandling,’’ a standup comic starring in a sitcom. During the life of the series, which was just released as a DVD box set, Shandling brought in Hollywood people such as Carl Reiner, Tom Petty, and Gilda Radner to play themselves.

Then, on HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show,’’ which ran from 1992-1998, Shandling was a fictional late-night host but he featured real stars such as Jim Carrey, Carol Burnett, and David Duchovny. The guests remade themselves in exaggerated, often ridiculous, and always funny ways.

The movies, too, have a tradition of self-adaptation, from the Beatles as “the Beatles’’ in their early movies and Howard Stern as “Howard’’ in “Private Parts’’ in 1997 to Neil Patrick Harris in the “Harold & Kumar’’ franchise. Robert Altman’s “The Player’’ gave us a long list of actors as themselves, including Julia Roberts, and “Being John Malkovich’’ had Malkovich as “Malkovich.’’ In this year’s satirical “Cold Souls,’’ Paul Giamatti plays a crotchety actor named “Paul Giamatti.’’

For the most part, when actors such as Giamatti or Duchovny play versions of themselves, their motives are quite different from ours when we make our Facebook pages. They’re trying to bring themselves down to size, to humanize their images. They’re emphasizing flaws for a comic effect - Harris undoing his impossibly perfect Doogie Howser image by playing a drugged-out version of himself, or Alley goofing on her weight problems. By revealing himself as petty and cheap, Isaak tried to show his sense of humor while taking himself off a pedestal before the audience could. But when the rest of us engage in self-adaptation online, the goal is generally the opposite: to show that our days are indeed worth chronicling, that our actions and thoughts form a good story.

We’re all posing, in a way - the celebrity is fronting as a kind of regular Joe, the regular Joe is fronting as a kind of celebrity.

And somewhere in between the two is the reality performer, that distinctly 2000s spectacle. Reality performers are all playing themselves, from the “ordinary people’’ on “Big Brother’’ to the D- and-F-listers of “Leave It to Lamas.’’ They may pretend to be unaffected by the cameras, just being themselves; but they all fashion characters for the screen, consciously or not, ranging from “the bitchy one’’ to, in the case of Gary Busey on “Celebrity Rehab 2,’’ “the crazy one.’’

The reality TV platform is, obviously, bigger and broader than most Facebook pages and personal websites. And most reality TV is a step down the quality ladder from “Curb Your Enthusiasm.’’ But they’re all on the same spectrum of fabricated selves, where real and fake intermingle to form a hybrid persona. They’re the stories of our lives, if not our lives. And they’re all available for viewing on a screen near you.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog.