1 post tagged “fractured”
So, I've been thinking about a blog that I read a while back, it's about our fractured online identities. I've noticed that as we all grow closer with our social networking, e-mail addresses, and Instant Messaging, we're growing farther away from ourselves. Right now, I have a crapload of accounts that each contain part of a description of me that I can't even keep track of. Here's the list of all of the online accounts that I can recollect off hand:
- Gmail
- Church e-mail
- Myspace
- Digg
- Vox
- last.fm
- Anywhere.fm
- About 20 different forums
- IM
- AIM
- MSN
- Yahoo! (I have 2 of these)
- Skype
- ICQ
- IRC
- Games
- Team Fortress 2
- Yahoo! Games
That's all that I can remember off hand, theirs about 40. I'm sure that their are people that have a lot more accounts than that for various reasons, but what is this doing to us and how we see other people? Pretty much everybody has an e-mail address that they sign up for different things with, then we meet people in real life. We then look at their myspace/facebook/whatever your socail network of choice is. And we start to make judgements about the people that we look at online. A webpage can't tell you everything about a person. But this generation has become a generation of computers. We find somebody's name, then we research them and index them by adding them to our friends list. Whatever happened to meeting somebody face to face and finding theings out that way?
People can look at my myspace or facebook right now and tell that I have a girlfriend. How do they know, because she posts a lot. But the only thing they know about her is what she has on her page. She has a whole bunch of likes, we all do, or at least what we want people to think that we like. But that doesn't really tell someone who you are. It is physically impossible to keep all of those profiles up to date. We can never show everybody everything that we want to show them about ourselves.
I loved social networking when it first hit; I was one of the first people on myspace. But now, I'm wondering, is it really networking us, or are just trying to collect friends and interests like pokemon cards?
