My Digital Life: Extremely Rough Draft

Facebook is supposed to reflect who we are, but is it really “who we are”? Facebook was created so you can keep your friends updated on your life. It was supposed to attract people like you who had the same to meet and keep up on your interests. We see that in the beginning of Facebook it was just that but it was evolving. People would share and post with close friends and interact more or less how they did in normal life; then the streamline information effect we read about in the “Is Google Making us Stupid” took effect. Instead of every bit of our lives being shared, we began only showing the parts of us we wanted to highlight. We highlighted our “party animal” side with endless photos of us at parties, or our “political guru” side with endless statuses about how we knew that our candidate could magically fix everything. We were no longer posting about the “boring” stuff. People were less concerned about using Facebook as a means to meet people and more as a web site to boast and show others how cool or popular they are. We no longer cared about connecting with people we actually knew but rather with how many people we were friends with. Facebook was destroying our social skills as well. We could argue with someone over comments on a status and then see this person in class and not say a word; if someone really pissed you off all you had to do was block them from your profile and you would never hear from them again. The way we would handle situations on Facebook could not be transferred over into the real world, Facebook was like a social armor that we could do or say anything in but when we took it off and were in public we would just shut down.

 

My Facebook history is an interesting one. I looked all the way back in my Facebook history and I found a few interesting things. When I first started “facebooking” (apparently because a girlfriend made me) I found most of my statuses were about her or about how much I liked her. We would have endless conversations with absolutely no substance on each other’s walls. I would “like” things on Facebook that I knew she would enjoy, and I would play her in games and pick out virtual buttons that I thought she would like. Looking back I’m extremely embarrassed with it but, that is what Facebook was to me, it was a way to interact with my girlfriend and occasionally my friends. Facebook started to take on a new meaning for me. I began posting everything and sharing everything. If I got sunburn one day you can bet I posed one hundred statuses recording the whole experience of that one sunburn. The stupid me, the intelligent me, and just about every other me there was put on display for every one of my friends to see. There was no part of my life that I would not post about. I “liked” just about everything that even remotely appealed to me, and I had statuses all the time. I was also posting on other people’s walls more than ever before; I was just about as social on Facebook as I was in real life. The last phase of my social transformation was my bare minimum/stream line/”cool me” stage. I would rarely post statuses and I never liked anything. I only posted the important things and I would “unlike” groups and pages that were no longer cool to me. I would post pictures of me playing rugby, of me partying, or of other things that were cool and were what I thought would get me the most likes. My statuses were always funny and would get a ton of “HAHA” comments, or they were really deep or smart and would start big long conversations in the commenting section. Now I find that I’m still using Facebook like I was in the recent past but only more stream line and more open. I only post interesting things or things I think are funny and my photos are starting to include family. So maybe I’m starting to grow into using Facebook how it was originally meant to be used.

 

The Facebook situation is an interesting one. You see that our use of it obviously evolves as we grow but is Facebook really portraying who we are? I think you can look at your own use of Facebook and see that it is not. We post only what we think is cool and not anything else. We do not want anyone else to see our not so cool sides so we don’t show them and when we get into public we become awkward and insecure because we don’t have our Facebook armor to protect us.  We have to like everything and Facebook ends up consuming our lives leaving little time for real friends and real fun. Because of that we are growing into a reclusive culture where the online version of us is nothing like the real us and even I am a part of this problem which is kind of a scary thought. I have not actually examined my Facebook life and my real life until now, and I certainly did not expect that Facebook was more or less a prison. I say prison because we only post the cool us so in public we feel trapped to only act like the person our Facebook reflects