Be Who You Want To Be

A lot of my friends and acquaintances make fun of me time to time on how many friends I have on Facebook. They’ll be saying, “how many friends do you have Mary, like over 1,000?” Truth is I do have over 1,000 friends on the networking site however that is because half of the friends are people from high school and half are from college and some are minor league baseball players I have met over the few years. The whole point on why I have so many friends is because of networking. I know this poses the fact that since I have so many friends, does that mean I hold back on putting more pictures up because I may not want that many people to be able to view my personal information? My honest answer is, even if I only had friends I truly know on the site, I would still not put more pictures and other personal information of myself because it is the internet and once we put something on the internet, it’s released into the cyber world where anyone and everyone can end up being able to view.

This then leads into what I learned from this article, and one crucial point made, I have not thought of often enough is, “Social identity [is the part of] personal identity—our sense of who we are—that comes from our group memberships and the social categories to which we belong…” (Ellis, 38). We create our identity (how we interact with others) by mixing it with our own personal identity we have already created for ourselves. How we establish what groups we are part of and what school we go to, where we work, all that plays in and constructs our overall identity. What I found interesting and useful about this article was how the author mentioned a lot throughout it how everything we do on this site, is based off our interactions with others we are friends with and when we put a profile picture up we are stating that means something to us and even though we already know how others may react to it, we still like to see what they truly have to say. This article made and helped me to be more aware of what my theory on this site or any networking site has been, which is, I know quite a few people who portray themselves differently sometimes a completely different person online in comparison to in person because they want to show to their friends how interesting and exciting they are. However, when you talk to them in person, the identity we thought they have, takes a 360 turn and really makes us question who the person really is, which one do we believe and trust more, what’s portrayed on their profile or how they are in face to face interaction or both?