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