Are you hiding the real you behind a maskI’ve been thinking about Facebook recently. I enjoy using Facebook to keep up with friends’ news and share my own.

But I’ve been thinking about how I choose to “present myself”.

It’s so easy on a public domain such as Facebook to pick and choose what we reveal about ourselves, what we choose to post on others walls, what we choose to put as our “status updates”. We can construct ourselves in a careful and planned way so that we are able to present only the best.

It’s the exact opposite of real family and community. When you live and share your life with people it’s impossible to hide the “bad bits”. They overflow out of us, often with no control. We put ourselves in a place of vulnerability when we let others see the darkness that’s within us. But we also put ourselves in a place to grow in our relationships, and allow other people to bring out all our potential. This is often when we feel truly alive.

What are your thoughts on this?

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  • http://siddatwork.com Administrator

    Hey Anna, thanks for contributing and raising a very relevant & important issue.
    I am in agreement. Facebook, My Space and the like do provide a convenient and safe way of masking our reality.
    Question is , is that any good ?
    cyber-stalker
    I think almost always bad and sometimes really dangerous. We have heard of cyber-stalkers, impersonators , criminal and malicious minds, haven’t we ?

    Besides, to grow as individuals and to be all that each one of us is meant to be, we have to get real. We have to.
    To be conveniently hiding skeletons in the closet is not the way to go.

    My thumb rule for FB/Orkut is that only use it to connect with people that you know [ know substantially ] and have met in real life.

  • http://srayyangar.blogspot.com S.R.Ayyangar

    I fully endorse your statement that “When you live and share your life with people it’s impossible to hide the “bad bits”. When it comes to family, sometimes people do mask their face to save the face!

  • Ken

    Hi Anna,
    thanks for your thoughts. The computer allows us the opportunity of sharing what we want when we want without anyone having to be in the loop or for us to be accountable or honest in anything we we keyboard, yet here I am using the same venue that I criticize!
    Community or family seems to be no longer a necessity, as I can chose who and when to be with. The social outcome of this reality will likely first begin to show it’s face in rising divorce rates and the demise of the family as we know it today. The other side is that we are created to be social and cannot bark against that which is intrinsically human. The farther that we push against our nature the more speedily we will be thrust back to where we ought to be, perhaps through disaster or crisis. Reading the history of nations that rise and fall I am convinced that we are surely too loved by the Creator to diverge too far before He brings us back.