Your Online Identity: Is It Really You?

We all put on mask from time-to-time to make us feel comfortable in uncomfortable situations. I believe this is a natural defense mechanism that occurs; sometimes unknowingly until afterthefact when we realize....what the hell was I just doing?!!?

In February 2006, I was a high school senior and I finally got my acceptance into Purdue University. At the time my older sister was a senior here at Purdue and Facebook was peaking as the premiere social networking website for specific to college students. A year or so prior I can remember her showing me this Facebook site and she was in love with it. She was showing me her friends, pictures, the concept of "poke"ing, and all the other things I couldn't do because I was only in high school. As most of you know, when you get accepted into Purdue (or any other University/College) you recieve a e-mail account with the magic ".edu" at the end. See several years ago you had to have a .edu email account to be able to sign up for Facebook, back when Facebook was Facebook. When I received my Purdue e-mail, the first thing I did was create a FB account and call my sister. She immediately requested, to a significant amount her friends, that they become my FB friend. She saw it as a way to show how "popular" or "cool" you were, as did I.



Little did I know, I was creating my "online identity." I was putting on my cyber mask to prove to the college world how many people I knew, how much fun I had, how many ladies i knew, and so on... I remember continuing to do this my freshman and sophomore year; only "tagging" pictures that showed me at my best. I wanted to be perceived as a fun, outgoing individual, that knew a lot of people and how to have a good time. Now, I'm not saying this was a complete lie... I am fun and know how to have a good time but I was only showing one side of my life. I wasn't posting family pictures or pictures of me at work or volunteering or studying or any other aspect of my life. I didn't realize at the time what kind of problems FB could cause because I just seen it as a way to perceive yourself in college. Then FB decided ANYONE could join and parents, school officials, and employers jumped on the FB train and I jumped off. I secured all my FB and I barely do anything with it anymore. To me FB was FB no more. Until now I never thought about my "online identity" and now I'm trying to recover it.



But this brings me to my question...Your Online Identity: Is It Really You?
In many cases I don't believe it is. People can carefully choose how they want to be perceived via the Internet. I chose to be the outgoing party-goer while some may have chosen a different way to perceive themselves; our online identity is only one aspect of who we really are. I believe it can be a EXTREMELY misleading aspect that I now realize we must monitor carefully. I was recently watching the Colbert Report and his guest, the director of the movie "The Social Network" who by the way doesn't have a FB account himself, had this to say about socializing via the Internet....

"Socializing on the Internet is to socializing; what reality TV is to reality." ~Aaron Sorkin

This quote made the audience make a "gasping" noise and I believe this is because they never thought of online socializing in that way; I believe they realized the truth in his statement. I 100% agree with him on this and believe that we are judging people too much based on what their myspace or FB or LinkedIn (which is a completely different mask we put on online; one with all the fabulous things we've done and what we want to accomplish..its all suits and smiles and well most of the time ....fake). I do believe you can tell a lot about someone from their online identity but we must step back... and really get to know the person you are evaluating; in person....You remember right??? The old fashion way to learn about someone face-to-face communication...