These are testing times in the theatre of the self. A war is being fought over our identities. The most powerful technology in the world is modelling and predicting our behaviours so that they might more effectively be monetised. Some elemental human questions are suddenly in play again: am I what I say I am, or am I what others say I am? Is there such a thing as free will? Are “friends” electric? But we contemplate them in arenas designed for profit; we scream our frustration in emojis (a language designed by committee)!

But cometh the hour, cometh the daytime TV presenter. Her name is Lorraine Kelly. Her name is also “Lorraine Kelly”. In Wednesday’s tribunal judgment, “Lorraine Kelly” set a worrying precedent for the future of celebrity taxation, but quite an interesting precedent in the meta-narrative of the human self. She has reserved the right to what John Updike termed Maskenfreiheit (mask-freedom). You see, the Lorraine Kelly you see on ITV isn’t Lorraine Kelly, but “Lorraine Kelly”, a fictional character who may resemble Lorraine Kelly in manner, appearance and infectious Glaswegian chuckle, but who isn’t the real Lorraine Kelly. Owing to a few peculiarities of tax law, that distinction might just have saved her £1.2m.

“We should make clear we do not doubt that Ms Kelly is an entertaining lady, but the point is that for the time Ms Kelly is contracted to perform live on air she is public ‘Lorraine Kelly’,” ruled the judge. “She may not like the guest she interviews, she may not like the food she eats, she may not like the film she viewed, but that is where the performance lies.”

This opens a can of existential worms. One aspect of Kelly’s argument hinged on the difference between her and Jeremy Paxman; Paxman doesn’t (theoretically) have to conceal his grumpiness when faced with a truculent minister. But isn’t that grumpiness its own kind of performance? When Tom Hiddleston appears as himself on the Graham Norton Show, is that a performance? Wouldn’t that make his actual acting a sort of double performance? Similarly, might Julia Hartley-Brewer argue, in a Hadean show trial hopefully, that she isn’t the horrendous person of popular repute but a “theatrical artist” who earns her living performing the opinions of a horrendous person? “Celebrity is the mask that eats into the face,” said Updike.

And even though Lorraine Kelly commands an 18% audience share on an early morning magazine show while most of us don’t, the distinction between celebrity and non-celebrity isn’t so vast. Social media has turned most of us into performers of one sort or another. To what extent is the me who appears on Twitter me? When I share a petition I just signed, I’m sort of performing, aren’t I? And when I respond to an Instagram post with a heart-eyed smiley face, am I being Richard Godwin or @richardjgodwin? You might chose to be professional on LinkedIn, sassy on Snapchat, and full of sh*t on Facebook. But are any of these people you?

One of the great insights of Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalysts was that none of us are in full conscious command of ourselves. We have multiple competing urges and at any moment, any one of them might pull us in one direction or another. What we think of as our conscious “self” is actually more like an internal narrator, trying to make sense of these squirming appetites after the event, convincing herself she is leading the meeting, whereas in fact it’s more like she’s taking the minutes. But the only thing that really gives your identity meaning and coherence – that makes you now that same person as you when you were five years old – is this narrative. It’s what turns a series of random events into a meaningful story. You.

One of the most reliable ways of changing yourself is to change the context in which you create yourself, and the language in which you narrate it. When I went to live in France as a student, for example, I was surprised to discover that I was bisexual in French – and a bit nonplussed to discover on returning home that I wasn’t bisexual in English. I was a different person in a different context. Which was the “real me”? Michel Foucault argued that there isn’t a “real you” to be discovered or revealed or confessed; the “real you” is something you create and continually recreate through language.

This, it seems to me, hints at one of life’s great challenges: to allow yourself enough wriggle room to create and recreate yourself, to give expression to the many potential selves you contain. It’s hard to do that within a format. Lorraine Kelly clearly feels her Lorraine Kelly-hood is denied full expression within the early morning magazine format; she has to be nice to Peter Andre; she has to pretend to be shocked when Colin Farrell swears.

But social media has its own formats. More often than not, the platforms we use to share our thoughts, perform our opinions and narrate our lives are designed with shareholder profit in mind. They reward consistency; but we are inconsistent. They reward confession; even when there is nothing to confess. What does all this do to our inner lives, our potential selves?

I spend a lot of time interviewing celebrities, and the contrasts between public and non-public persona is always interesting. Odious trolls prove to be quite charming real life; nice-guy comedians turn out to be dicks; daytime TV presenters turn out to be wonderfully complex. But there’s something I’ve been noticing recently when I’ve interviewed people who have become famous through social media: influencers, YouTubers, make-up vloggers, etc. They are, quite often, exactly the same in real life as they are on social media. But it’s frequently hard to tell where person ends and persona begins, as if their success is the result of some process of digital natural selection, or, more ominously, a mass formatting of the human soul.

Maybe this is what Lorraine Kelly is warning us about. Or maybe she just wants to save a bit of money. We must be open to all possibilities.

•Richard Godwin is a freelance journalist