There’s the saying I can be whoever I want online. We can create personas and make people believe we are whoever we want to be. But the same goes the other way. We can make someone whoever we want them to be online. I’m not suggesting that we are creating faux profiles for other people, but we are building these fantasy people through what we see, rather than what we experience. We are willing to accept and mentally embellish what people give us through technology. We convince ourselves we know people better than we do because we can see their lives unfold before us on our timelines. We can often see this flaw in others, but rarely recognize it in ourselves. I hear girls tell me how sweet it is that they got a good night text or how he’s clearly thinking about her and cares so much, when he can’t be bothered to make time to see her. Can he really care that much if he’s not willing to make an effort? There is little effort in texting someone, if they’re consistently not responding or reaching out, it’s not because they’re busy, it’s because they don’t want to. We would rather construct a plethora of excuses for why they can’t talk to us, rather than admit the obvious, that they don’t want to. It’s easier to think he didn’t see your text than to accept that he ignored it.
When we can depend on social media for varying degrees of contact, it creates this false sense that we have more contact with someone than we actually do. He favorited my tweet, he’s obviously interested in what I’m doing! People ingest posts and pictures online like they were meant specifically for them. We willingly accept text conversations over face to face interaction and choose to update people through the internet, rather than in person. How many times have we been told by friends or told a friend to “go look at my wall, post, tweet, etc”. They wanted you to see it, but then again they wanted everyone else to see it too. There’s so much you miss in a conversation without the face to face aspect. In texts and post we can edit and photoshop to our hearts desire. Imagine what we’d know if we could see everything that was backspaced? Or better yet, watch the expression on someone’s face when they have to immediately react to what you’ve just said. You can throw your phone away after sending a risky text, but it’s not socially acceptable to throw someone after saying something risky. Or I guess more realistically we would walk away. If you got up and walked away from someone every time you said something honest, people would probably start suggesting counseling. And if you tried to throw someone every time, you would have an extensive police record.
We laugh or pity those on shows like Catfish, but we’re all guilty of falling for technology tricks. People seem so much more witty or caring or even rude online. Are we being more honest online or are we all characters? Be more honest with your friends and yourself when you catch yourself building someone to something they aren’t because of technology. Let’s put more value in actions and less into pretty words. https://katienem.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/build-me-a-castle/
Catherine with a C, Katie with a K 