Blog 3: Online Identity

At this point in time, I feel like we have no choice but to consider our online profiles as extensions of our real-life existences. Users don’t have complete control over what they post online; it can easily be passed on to people outside of specific networks in spite of whatever privacy settings have been set. Thus in an age where employers, parents, and prospective friends routinely check up on individuals through their Facebook profiles, users have to consider audiences much wider than their immediate personal connections. It’s somewhat unsettling to know that a stranger can judge you solely on the basis of an online profile. I primarily use Facebook and for these reasons I mostly keep my profile limited to the most basic information about me with limited accessibility to photos and a few page “likes.”

 

I used to have some of my interests in music and film listed, but this part of my profile lagged behind my evolving tastes and became cumbersome to have to revise. They were certainly carefully selected to communicate a certain kind of image, but eventually I no longer cared who knew I listened to which obscure indie band. Now I see Facebook and other social networking sites primarily as tools of communication, to share messages, links, and photos with the people in my life. I have focused less on crafting my actual profile except for changing privacy settings and the occasional update of my profile picture. After years of using Facebook, I’ve found it a bit awkward to scan an acquaintance’s profile and see what their interests are and then to have to feign surprise when they mention it in an actual face-to-face conversation.

 

There are always certain people on your Newsfeed who are much more active than other Facebook friends, updating their statuses throughout the day, posting real-time images, and changing the statuses of their relationships. These people, of course, make Facebook more interesting. But every time I see yet another post from one of these active users, it seems like they are getting close to the point of over sharing. Their frequent updates have shaped a certain identity for them via Facebook that might not necessarily align with how they present themselves offline, but can nonetheless be transferred into real-life relationship. Sometimes it seems like constantly projecting an updated online identity to everyone you are friends with on SNS almost diminishes the value of face-to-face interactions and reduces an individual’s control over the different relationships in their lives.


Cindy H.

Post #3: Profile ME

“You deleted your Myspace?! What’s WRONG with you?” I exclaimed at my friend when she told me the news.

She shrugged, and said, “I have a Facebook now. You should get on it.”

When I first laid eyes on Facebook – the new profile page in trend everyone was ditching Myspace for, I stared at it in distaste and confusion. How could this be appealing? I thought. You couldn’t even put in your own background, or change the font OR its color. How can you ever be unique with a profile like that? In stark contrast to my black & crimson patterned Myspace, Facebook’s plain and structured blue-and-white was disgusting. (Don’t judge, I was 15 and in my Goth phase) From that point on, I just knew that there would never be a day that I would give up my Myspace for anything because it was explicitly me.

“Yeah right,” I said to my friend, “You should just, like, keep Myspace, ‘cause no one is like, going to get on this.”

Well, who knew I would be so fickle? And SO wrong about Facebook’s popularity?

I can’t quite remember when I made the switch over or when my feelings about it began to change, but I do know that when I first made my profile, it was chock-full of information about myself just to make up for Facebook’s lack of user individuality. Interests, Activities, Movies, Television Shows, Quotes… everything had a very specific wording and order placement so that browsing eyes could catch the most important things about me. To the Me now, it all seems so pointless to care so much, but I guess in defense of myself and others who worked so hard to portray an identity, we were all just looking for an identity.

My profile today is so much more different. Again, I don’t really know how and when it began to change so much, but it was definitely a gradual change that came about through personal choice and Facebook’s constant lay out changes. In terms of my profile and self-representation, I definitely still care about what I put up, the status updates I post, and the photos that show up on my profile, of course, but for the most part, my Facebook page is catered to be more professional than personal. I tend to focus a lot more on making sure my Work section is up-to-date, and that my listed interests, films, and quotations are still hold-up as my favorite things. Everything I list on my profile page is definitely reflective of my tastes and interests, but I definitely make the effort to put forth what I believe to be the best and most interesting part of me. And yet… I have noticed that while my interests and tastes have changed and expanded over the years, I definitely have less to say on my profile about who I am. I think it has to do with a number of reasons. While I have matured, and am looking to build a more professional profile, it is also a matter of Facebook’s own limitations in its ability to display who I am. While you can list any number of things on your profile, I have realized that it just isn’t the same as ME… no matter how many words, topics, or movie titles, or inspirational/funny quotes I list, it can never fully encapsulate who I am

And at some point, I became okay with that.

Because I figured, that if someone is truly looking to get to know me and who I am really am, they should actually do so in person rather than remaining a perpetual stalker. Profiles are merely reflections of who we are and who we want to be in the eyes of others.

 

--Charli Lee

Blog#3 my identity in SNS

My first participation in SNS took place in Mixi. Unlike facebook profile, profile in Mixi is not only constructed by choosing your demographical information such as gender, date of birth, education and occupation nor making a list of your favorites and interests but it is also created by “writing” a short summary of yourself (like Hi, my name is …I am from…I do…etc.). Mixi users’ profile are more based on texts they write than images. What I mean by texts here are the self-introduction of the users and their diaries if they do not block them. There is a profile picture and features that allow you to upload your photo albums, but showing yourself in profile picture is pretty rare and many people either block their albums or do not post any pictures. Although facebook allows you to write about yourself for self-representation, I believe that a users’ identity more relies on images that are open to friends than texts. Of course, on facebook, people can also present their identities by their listed “tastes”, statuses, and short notes; however, their photos have such an influence on their identities that others heavily depend on their photos to judge who they are.

I remember when I first created my profile on mixi in my high school age. When I joined mixi, it was the first social network site for most of the users including myself. Therefore, it seemed that people on mixi were still figuring out what personal information should be included or not in their profiles. Compared to now, my friends’ profiles and mine at the time, what we write in our self-introductions and our diaries, looked very formal and polite. In other word, we looked all same in mixi; since it was our first SNS, we were afraid of showing such personal information to the public that it can show other users our real “self”. In terms of tastes also, there was not much diversity among my friends’ profiles and mine. I actually didn’t have any list of my favorite, my one-paragraph-long self-introduction consisted of vague information about me, and I had my dog in my profile picture.

As I got used to being open on the Internet and more people started personalizing their profiles to find more friends, I revised my profile. I made my self-introduction sound more casual and friendly and include a little more personal information like my hobbies and favorite artists. So my motivation here for changing my profile is to conform with the unmentioned social norm amongst my friends at the time. They started to add more tastes that reflect their personalities, so I started to do so too. Although I was pretty used to showing myself making a pose in my profile picture because of my use of facebook, my profile picture is still my dog in mixi. It is because I feel it will be awkward if I show my self-pictures in my mixi profile as I do in facebook even though none of my friend does it.

I would say my tastes listed in my facebook and mixi are almost same, but I don’t think that they precisely reflect my true tastes. Quite many times, I have added my favorite films, artists, and other things in my interest according to my mood of the moment, so the lists of my tastes in both sites are partially correct but they include some things that I do not like any more. I just do not want to be bothered to spend my time in getting rid of them because I believe none of my friends really care about my interests even if I change them.

Although my tastes shown in the social network sites I mainly use look similar, my whole profile in each site might not show the same identity. When I am on mixi I expect my audience to be my Japanese friends, and on facebook, my international friends. I hardly write a diary on mixi, but I do write it when something big happens in my life here and wants to tell it all the way back to my friends living in Japan. I do not post any boring information about my every-day life in mixi as I do in facebook statuses. And I think my profile pictures listed on facebook cannot be used for mixi because choosing self-picture (especially nice one) for a profile can mean to audience that you have much confidence in your appearance or you seek for somebody to date with (I believe these are main reasons why a very small number of people have themselves in their profile pictures on mixi and why I still keep my dog in my profile pic). On facebook, I have more freedom. I post whatever status I feel like telling and whatever pictures I feel like setting as my profile.

Thus, I tend to be more self-conscious on mixi than facebook. The audience on mixi is pretty homogeneous, so I try to form my identity harmonize with how the other users show their identities; whereas, facebook users are more diverse, so that I feel I can merge into the “facebook society” even though whatever unique information I add for my self-representation. I am aware of the eyes of audience in both site, but the characteristic of the audience can affect me how I present myself.

sachi

My Social Network Profile

As time progresses, I’ve found myself becoming less and less likely to post all of my ‘true’ interests to my Facebook profile.  In the short period of time that I had a MySpace in early high school, I had dozens of my favorite bands, TV shows, films, and books listed in hopes that my profile would accurately portray my interests and character.  I kept that same idea when I first joined Facebook in 2006, and had my ‘favorites’ listed as I entered college and formed my new friendships.

Once I was settled at school, I suddenly no longer felt the desire to portray all of my ‘real’ interests on my Facebook profile.  I had always left my “about me” as a YouTube link to a random funny video rather than writing about myself, and that mentality slowly transferred to all other aspects of my profile.  Where I once felt ‘cool’ listing the thirty or so indie bands that I was into at any given moment, my one music interest merely reads “DJ Roomba!,” a Parks and Recreation reference that links to its fan-made Facebook page.  I was amused by Facebook’s recently added, “People Who Inspire You” section, and added Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, “Boo” (the little Facebook dog phenomenon), and “Spagett!,” a character from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!  None of these fictional/canine characters are my true inspirations, and much of my reasoning for adding them was that they had Facebook pages that would show up as tiny icon pictures on my profile.  In somewhat recent structure alterations, Facebook has made it so that any “interest” that doesn’t have a proper Facebook page has a gray standard “music,” “film,” etc. icon rather than a photograph, and it throws off the fluidity.  If I did decide to accurately list all of my favorite bands, shows, and films, there are several that do not have Facebook pages, and the random gray icons for my Facebook-less interests would inevitably get on my nerves.

The only life events that inspire a change in my profile are school enrollments/graduations, jobs, and changes in relationships, although I am currently engaged in a four-year-long fake Facebook marriage that doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon (unless my fake husband decides otherwise).  As I get older, my desire to change my profile to accurately portray my current interests and life-status is fading.  The fact that I used to think, “I found this awesome new band, I need to add it to my profile” seems so foreign to my current Facebook mentality.  I do my best to only accept friend requests from ‘friends’ who already know me, and my assumed audience is those who won’t feel the need to learn about me from my social network profile.

Jen L.

 

Social Media & Identity Post - Justin Tuma

As I have matured in life and have gone through many phases, I have come to the conclusion that identity is fluid.  So when considering if my tastes or interests reflect any sense of ‘true’ tastes, I am not hesitant to say that they never really can be.  My interests as a senior in high school share some overlap with those of my senior year profile - but I have no doubt grown and changed as a person.  In this last year, I have limited the ability of others to view my interests in books, movies, etc.  I have found that most profiles are only a loose indicator of a person - interests in particular.  Instead, what they choose to show (and not to show) is more telling - especially with photos.  Images for me at least, are a more useful indicator of a person’s essence.  Listings of tastes may hardly overlap with the best of friends.

 

I have mentioned in class that I have felt limited by the profile structure of social networking sites.  It may very well be due to the fact that I am a very visual person, but I feel that the profile picture has become the biggest most summarizing part of a profile.  It has become the facebook equivalent of the first impression.  Since I feel I am not photogenic, and that no single picture can really represent who I am as a person, I have deferred to other images of objects, art works, or fictional characters that I identify with.  In a way it is a way out of peer judgement.  But for the most part it is is for me -  I feel comfortable with this method of presenting myself to the world and to myself.  Not having to directly look back at my reflection and summary online, I feel has helped me avoid being neurotic.

 

I feel the need to update my profile when there is something significant ‘story-wise’ in my life.  Essentially I mean, if there is something worthy of chatting with a friend over, or gossiping about later - it is worth putting up.  Unlike many who feel the need to document every social event, I try to limit myself to what I label as ‘significant’ trips and ‘significant’ experiences - narrowing down a flood of photographic representation.  As time passes, and both my social skills and relationship with facebook have changed, I feel less and less inclined to share online.  I have decided that social media is not at all the place to express everything and anything that I think or experience.  My life is not that profound or cinematic - and I’m fine with that.

Blog Post # 3 - Me Myself and I on Social Networking Sites

 

When I think of the display of my tastes on a social networking site my mind thinks mainly back to the days of Myspace. At first my tastes and the way I portrayed myself via myspace was pretty direct. The music tastes I posted were pretty much accurate as well as my interests and about me. However, now that I think of it I definitely put things like “likes to play tennis, dance, and gymnastics” when by then I had quit all dance and tennis so it was a little up-played. I guess it’s because when someone asks you your hobbies they would probably look at you or think of you as some type of boring person if you answer nothing or “uh, I dunno stuff” kind of way. When you’re portraying yourself to your peers you at least want to seem to be someone that others would admire or get along with. Thinking along these lines I guess my music tastes weren’t entirely accurate. I mean I probably left out my secret remaining love for the Backstreet Boys or Britney Spears so people wouldn’t judge me. However, eventually I used my myspace as instead of a way to portray my real self but portray my humor. I started putting ridiculous things in my interests or put my self as being 7 feet tall with more to love than what I really looked like. I guess I got bored of talking about myself and wanted myself to come off as someone humorous and fun to get along with by making fun of the whole idea of “talking about yourself” via a social networking site.

            As I “graduated” to Facebook I decided to be honest about my tastes and myself. I put any musician I like up even the ones people would look at me crazy for. However, after last weeks discussion where Ceci commented that if she saw anyone with Nickleback listed under the musicians they liked she would automatically not want to be friends with them I started thinking maybe I should down play my tastes and stick to neutral tastes that most people won’t have an extremely strong opinion about, because, I don’t want to be written off just because of something on my facebook. I mean, my interests and tastes listed on Facebook are not outrageous but I have noticed that displaying your tastes or opinion via Facebook can be really quite dangerous. For example as Occupy Wall Street came to be I noticed a variety of Facebook debates via statuses because of differing opinions. I saw facebook friendships and real friendships be jeopardized just because someone was a part of a different political party. It is really quite amazing how Facebook is such an outlet for aggression over differing tastes. I, myself, have found myself being skeptical of a person because of a quote on their Facebook or something along those lines. It’s kind of scary to think of because by you realizing yourself that you may sometimes judge someone because of his or her facebook that means you’re probably being judged for your facebook as well. Facebook and other social networking sites that allow you to put your tastes out there to the world is both beneficial and not. You may want to get to know someone better because of something you saw on your facebook while you may hate someone off the bat because of something you saw. It’s almost as If Facebook is an outlet for people to be rightly judgmental because well let’s face it if you didn’t want someone seeing a particular thing you like to do than you didn’t have to post it.

            I have noticed myself being particularly concerned with the statuses that I post on Facebook. It may because when I see someone constantly updating their status about things that just seem – at least to me, extremely pointless I start feeling a little insecure as to whether or not people will think that way about my statuses. That’s why when I do post a status it’s usually an interesting quote from a song or movie that I thought was thought provoking and should be shared with my facebook world. It’s interesting to think about your audience, which is why I bet plenty of people take time to stalk themselves just to see what other people might see and/or think when they look at their profiles. This doesn’t plague my mind to often but thinking about my audience does urge me to tweak my profile

Jessica W

Blog Post #3: Multiface Media

My reflection of myself is contingent on the social medium I use. I would not say that there are not many individuals who maintain Facebook sites with the utmost transparency, yet at the same time I would not say that people tend to fully devise identities. For me, I find that different truths in my personality manifest themselves on different sites.  Facebook is my most used social media. My Facebook reveals the most accuracy about my life and fulfills a greater range of attributes - from work to school to music interests and quotes to live by, I would argue that it is the most encompassing of social mediums I use. However the information I expose on my Facebook is drastically different from my LinkedIn or Twitter.  On LinkedIn I purposefully try to exhibit my professional face. I structure my profile much like a resume and follow groups that converse about the field I wish to work in - advertising. As my imagined audience is a prospective employer, I am careful to choose a profile picture that I feel a company would look at and say, "This girl looks put together and friendly. We want her representing us."  On the business front, I dress my Twitter in a similar manner.  However, I'd say my Twitter is more of the middle ground between personal and business.  I tweet about many ad related topics, however these are often interrupted by food tweets or something of a similar nature.  While I may cater both my LinkedIn and Twitter to the professional sphere, pieces of myself that I share are still truthful snippets of my life - articles I enjoyed to read, topics I found interesting. 

This year I started using a Tumblr. I've decided to use it in the most traditional blog-writing nature (not the whole re-blogging someone else's post facet). I decided to start a Tumblr because I enjoy writing and thought it would be a fun way to practice writing for an audience.  At first I excited about it, but I found that my Tumblr posts take a long time to write. Why? Because I have come to learn that I am exceedingly self-conscious of other people reading my writing.  But it is not necessarily other people or strangers - it's the people in my social circles that I am conscious about reading my work.  I have my Tumblr linked to my Facebook so that when a post is published it is presented on my feed.  I see my Tumblr as a test of my creativity and unfortunately I do not test it enough. I hold myself to a standard and do not like to post for the hell of it. Perhaps one can argue that the reflection of myself is carefully illuminated. 

Identities are revised all the time - whether its for the specific medium of for the moment in an individual's life, its a way of showing the change or growth in a person's life.  Of course that slightly depends on what is being revised.  Individuals cater their self expression to the medium they practice on.  As MCC majors one of those sentences that is forever engrained in our head is McLuhan's "the medium is the message." In this case, I feel like the specific social medium used conveys the intended message and reflection of one's self. 

CSMT--"Infiltrated" Blog #3

I am not a fan of putting too much of my preferences of books, music, or activities on Facebook for the following reasons: my interests changes frequently and moves to different stages; in addition, I don’t think these listings necessarily elicit others’ interest to want to communicate with me more or less. On the Chinese version Renren, sharing of content is more a norm, and my taste and personality is more so determined by the topics I choose to share with my friends so they can define me through the things I am interested in. On Facebook, such sharing culture exists in a lesser extent and a person’s status, in my opinion, seems to be more about the messages on the walls and the events attended.

Social network provides a platform to showcase one’s life on a daily, even instant, basis which has become the reason to impress others with the photos of glamor and excitement. I think the idea of a friend circle plays into this share creation of friendship and intimacy—with tagging and commenting (which often is reserved for people who are present together)—there is a heightened sense of closeness exhibited for people outside of the circle to observe.

Relationship status is also a thorny issue that can become the area of contention for many couples. There is the discrepancy between the accepted social stigma for updating relationship status and personal privacy concerns. Very likely a big chunk of the friends on Facebook are “acquaintance,” “third or fourth degree relations,” yet for them to have the chance peek-a-boo into one’s personal sphere seems awkward and unnecessary yet so prevalent in today’s SNS saturated culture.

Social network presence has become a necessary existence and without it one is hardly complete. However, the deep infiltration and the constant struggle to balance the sense of self and the perceived image can be troubling as we adapt to a new system of communication via SNS and new values to be internalized.

Ivy Yang  

In an ideal world, my monomedia content describes my identity. I'm tired of listing favorites.

I suppose the place to begin is the big kahuna, Facebook.  When I first joined in May 2006 (I just checked), I wasn’t interested in agonizing over the details of listing my favorite books and movies, instead I quickly tried to populate the space so it wouldn’t look too empty and then I could move on to adding new friends and posting on their wall. After this initial rush subsided, I did go back and take a closer look at what I had listed. At the time, I hadn’t really been cultivating much of an offline persona, I was just another high school sophomore, but I had been discovering lots of esoteric music online, and so alongside The Decemberists and Bob Dylan (everything was alphabetized) I added entries like Muzykoterapia, a Polish jazz-electronica group, and Rodrigo y Gabriela, a flamenco-metal duo who were just emerging. Today, Muzykoterapia (which I found out today literally means “music therapy”) has 523 ‘likes’ and the Mexican guitarists have over 200 thousand.


My understanding of the ‘favorites’ section of the page was that I could click on the my hyperlink text and find all my friends who share the same favorites, and then those in my high school and city networks. In essence, it is still this way, but now the hyperlinks don’t bring the users to each other, but rather to wikipedia-based placeholders or the brands’ self-controlled homepages. Very clever, Mr. Zuckerberg, verrry clever.  Nevertheless, now that this section has been gridded and given images, I find myself being far less selective as to what I “like” and then gets added to my page. Now, even more than when I first joined, so many things on my page that don’t fall neatly into Facebook’s main categories, ‘liked’ photographers, software, web comicists, blogs, vloggers, city institutions and art galleries are all filed way under “other” or “entertainment.”  I’ve tried to flood the page with a wealth of associations which dilute the initial impact of my page, but I feel reflect a more holistic version of my identity, distorted slightly by having to ‘like’ certain pages (and forgetting to ‘unlike’ them) in order to communicate with them. Other ‘interests’ are listed purely because they have a digital home on Facebook and their peers do not. Last note about Facebook: I get flak for waiting to change my profile picture until at least a year has passed. (The current one is from moving-in day, sophomore year.) I’d much prefer that the profile picture was randomized from a group of them, and the user had a static icon. On the other hand, I really enjoy photography and take much pride when a friend makes my photo their 'default.' I wish there was a better way of expressing this or integrating the many hundreds of photos I've uploaded on my profile page without drinking the Timeline koool-aid. Another oddity is that I disable my birth date from being publicly seen until about a week before my birthday. All of the ‘fun’ of that avalanche of wall posts with less of the privacy risk.


In fact, other than some details of my Facebook profile, I have rarely seen the need to update the most artificial ‘about me’ sections of the social media I inhabit.  The profile page for the site I’ve used the longest, Flickr, has hardly been touched since I joined over six years ago. (I’m going to take advantage of this moment to remove “camp counselor” from the occupation field.)  In fact, the only other thing I’ve removed from the page were ‘favorites’ and ‘interests’ after some friends made me an ersatz Myspace page in 8th grade using Flickr’s public information once it was clear that I had no interest in joining that network.  My twitter ‘about me’ has hardly changed either.  On sites like Twitter and Flickr, a majority of my contacts are not IRL friends, and moreover, the sites (Flickr especially) have more material and explicit purpose than Facebook: to share content, but closed class content of 140 characters and photos respectively. And I’d hope that the photos I share shape my identity as a photographer and likewise my tweets as an engaged user.  Compare this to to Facebook’s utopian ‘cradle-to-grave’ locus of your life, as we saw in the fairly creepy F8 (‘fate’) conference video, where content is to be primarily shared with the network and secondarily function as a personal archive. With relatively few IRL contacts, my content on Flickr and Twitter my content is the other way around: first for me, and then for you.

 

-Ari

[And by "You" I mean Tumblr.]

 

What My Facebook Says About Me, According to Me...

After taking Intro to Visual Culture (with Kayla), I could never look at Facebook or online profiles the same. It’s not to say that I downright stopped using them, but the extent to which I could thoroughly express myself through them kind of went down the drain. Why so sudden? Learning an entire semester’s worth of material about why we as humans will be, and always have been, obsessed with: the gaze, fetishizing eachother, the panopticon and the entire concept of the voyeur is kind of taxing on the nineteen year old psyche. Especially when that nineteen year old is pretty involved with images. My dad is a professional photographer and ever since birth I have had to get over the concept of being ‘camera shy’. Test shoots, documenting, he loved taking artsy cute little pictures of me and my family through our entire childhood into teens. As much as I don’t want to admit it, this definitely had its effect on me and how much I wanted to portray to the outside world through images.


           

Images control almost anything. Why was Myspace so popular and why does Facebook continue to persist? Photo albums that serve as up to date ‘image updates’. If Facebook wasn’t so image (not like identity or anything abstract) oriented, I don’t think it would have stayed so popular and on top. There are lots of different types of Facebook profiles; The over- the- top taste descriptions: 50 fav books, 50 fav movies, and then there is the entirely naked profile. Pretty absent of any description, some people have even figured out the privacy to a point where you can’t even see whom their FRIENDS are (how do you do that I don’t know). I definitely fall somewhere in the middle. If we were just talking about “taste” description and if I accurately reflect them, then I would probably be told I have a very empty profile.  No interests listed, only two musical artists (my friend’s bf’s band and Drake obviously), no books, no movies, only some weird groups and companies I have “Liked”. Mostly yoga studios.


            I don’t feel very limited by the profile structure, I think that if anything could better portray me, that would freak me out. Once again back to the visual. I think where I try to give my audience (basically friends, family and the occasional new people I let into my life) the best idea of what they are going to get with my online persona, is in my pictures. I’m a kind of an annoying de-tagger. I don’t want a million pictures of me doing the exact same thing, and at this point in my life, I am really sick of getting my picture taken. My dad kind of screwed me on that one. But, I think this has allowed me to get more out of pictures than anywhere else on the profile. I don’t have ridiculous profile pictures, nor do I really give anyone a great idea of what I ACTUALLY look like. I kind of tell a story in them. I don’t keep more than 12-15 profile pictures up and all of them in some way, help describe my life. A lot of nature, a lot of good old friends, there’s my mom and my dog in a skype snapshot, a picture of me and my cat when I was 7, another picture of my cat in my kitchen, a third picture of my cat…oh gosh. Anyways, all the pictures are in some way or another, beautiful in my eyes. Either the scenery, the people in it or the place. It’s kind of my life in a very small nutshell, which I am okay with. People know me and if they don’t, that’s alright too. I don’t think anything about my Facebook profile will make or break anything.


            Lastly, I don’t often revise the contents of my Facebook profile. Last I told the class, I was going through the process of figuring out if I was going to become “In A Relationship” with my boyfriend or not. Turns out, I caved. That’s really the only time I have changed my profile for a life event, but it is recent so I guess I should think about that. I am not one to ever really do the relationship status thing, it’s been about 3 years since I was actually Facebook official with anyone other than, like, my best friend. I think I am, hopefully, reaching a point in my somewhat adult life where I don’t care what people know and don’t know. My mom did tell me that it takes a lot of time to really not care what the 'other thinks, and I know I’ve got years to go, but I am going to just start to try WORKING on that. Because I think that’s what can get us all at the end of the day. Stressing about what people see and don’t see, care and don’t care about on all of our weird avatar Facebooks can cause lots of unnecessary drama. It’s weird but it is completely natural. People are our mirrors to ourselves sometimes, and at other times it really doesn't matter.


~Sophie