In an increasingly digital world, first impressions are often made before you even meet face-to-face. With Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., someone can can get to know your online presence before he or she ever even has an exchange with you. But if we knowingly post and share what we do online, why is this a problem?
This summer, when I went on my abroad program, we formed a Facebook group beforehand with all of the students who were going. A few of the students were quite active on the page, so I went with the expectation that they would be the really outgoing ones when we got to Spain.
When we got there and started getting to actually know each other, I actually confused two of the students because one was very outgoing and proactive about planning--in person, and the other had been so on Facebook. I was shocked that they weren't the same person, and as I told my friend, their Facebook personalities did not match their actual personalities.
And herein lies the danger of living in a society in which we can digitally and anonymously meet strangers before we do so physically--we can curate, censor, mold our online profiles into what we want to present to an outside audience. We edit our photos, create our posts, select our "likes" all with the knowledge that others will be viewing this content and forming some sort of opinion, however temporary that may be.
On Facebook, we don't have to be ourselves. We have the opportunity to create the image of being someone more artsy, more eco-friendly, more outdoorsy, more sceney, more adventurous, more cultured, and so many other adjectives.
But as a culture this changes our social expectations and creates a pressure to live up to this potential persona or the profiles of others. With a couple keystrokes and a few clicks, we can now more easily compare ourselves digitally to others, a process that can quickly become toxic as we form opinions of others prematurely or degrade our actual selves based on the digital selves of others.
In the end, whenever I view something or someone on Facebook I have to remember that it's like watching a movie or reading a book. This is not the pure version of real life; this is life edited for society's viewing pleasure, formatted to fit a PC or Mac near you.
