I had never been a big Internet guy until facebook. In high school everyone always used AIM and I never really did. I mean, I did sometimes, but I never really got into it. In college when I heard about facebookI figured I would make an account just to find old friends. When I first made my page I just put a simple picture of my self that I took at arms length. I wrote a few things about my self like my age, sex, and what I liked to do in my spare time. I did not really care what people thought of me when they looked at my page I just wanted to find other people and look at their pages to see what they were up to. After I did this for awhile I realized that other people might want to know what i was up to and things that i liked to do. This was when I decided to change my profile and really try to let people know who I was.
I put all of my favorite pictures of myself and my friends up. I wrote paragraphs about who i was and what i liked to do. I read through my profile to make sure it sounded like I was doing well and looked good to other people. I didn't want anyone to really know if I got bad grades or if I had gained the freshman 15 or maybe it was 25. I organized my profile to make it seem that I was doing great at everything and looked just like I did in high school. I got away with all of this until my girlfriend read my page and called me out on all of it. She told me that it didn't even seem like it was my page. She said that if she read that she would think I was a totally different person. This kind of made me made until I thought about it and realized she was so right. I went right onto my profile with her and changed all of my info to show the real me. I even put up recent pictures showing the real me.
All of this made me think of how any one of my old friends that have facebook profiles could be doing what I had done originally. i don't really know if my old friends are doing well or not because if they are not doing well I doubt they are going to put it on facebook. If I were to speak to them face to face I think they would tell me how they were really doing, but since I just see their profiles I don't really know how they are. this actually really makes me sad because I want to know how they are really doing and since they can put whatever they want online I really don't know the true them anymore. I think this is one of the worst things about facebook. if I were to call my friends of meet them face to face I would know the real them, but since I don't. I just look on facebook to check up on them I end up seeing potentially fake information. It would be cool if people felt comfortable putting up negative information on facebook, but I don't think they ever will so I am going to have to just call my friends. Not such a bad thing I guess.
3 comments:
Andy, it appears that you have realized how fake people can be. They put on their good faces and parade through life hiding behind it. In person, it may be more difficult to pretend but using the internet with no visual clues, it is next to impossible to identify or understand the traumas, stresses, pains and failures most of us face daily. It is sad that they hide their true identities (humanness with imperfections), behind the false fronts that are exhibited in the various sites like My Space, Facebook and others. Wouldn’t it serve a better purpose if we became real? It is like a Barbie and Ken syndrome of public perfection displayed to gain acceptance. But behind each real person lies a full spectrum of human emotions that reflect how very fragile and small we really are.
I would have to agree with you on all aspects of your post. I had a similar incident with my Facebook also. I had put up information on my page that made me look even better than who I really was. Until my girlfriend took a look at my profile and expressed her feelings about how I sounded like a total stranger. I realized that mostly everybody on Facebook puts up only positive information about them and not any negative information. I believe that you have to put up both positive and negative information in order to show your true self and not to "fake".
I think it’s hard for someone to perceive themselves in a negative way for the fact they might not be proud of it. I think Facebook is a way we as user can deceive people. This deception that we use on Facebook is a good one because it keeps everyone happy and although we may not be telling the true story, were not entirely lying. I think we all paint false beliefs at times because we aren’t proud to admit when were not doing well. Being proud of not doing well or even posting it in the “Cyberworld” may continue to keep someone in the state of mind they’re in. With this being said it’s good to have this fantasy world in which networking systems can’t help us create hope that everything will be alright.
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