Did I really Say that?

In this week’s blog I am going to look at just exactly how we represent ourselves through social media with popular sites such as Facebook or, twitter and, how they relate to our everyday lives presently.

As discussed in a lecture people all over the world put these elements of; Family, Sub-culture, Gender, Class, Ethnicity, Nationality and Education have used in our lives today to create our identity which we live with today.  The majority of the things listed above can’t be changed about us like for instance; family. But, your family can be altered though to be viewed or represented in a different way to which they are normally seen. For example; you could visit your friend’s house and any time you would see his father he would look miserable. But if your friend’s father uploaded a picture on Facebook of him and, his mates in the pub on a Friday night getting drunk, you may start thinking of him in a different frame of mind which you had him in before. Facebook has the ability to almost create a different person out of you by the way you represent yourself on it.  As my lecturer Gavin Stewart, pointed out “We are more likely to upload pictures of us on sandy beaches in Ibiza then, us in A2 actually studying”. That statement has a major amount of evidence backing it up as, I have rarely ever seen pictures uploaded by friends whilst they are studying or reading a book.

It is very clear to see that on Facebook and maybe even twitter, people try to present fun side and more sociable lifestyle to what we originally may think.  I also think that we (myself include) get the sense of knowing you must accept someone as a friend before, they are able to see ‘your wall’ and pictures also allows us to relax and not care much about the pictures we upload. As well as knowing that our bosses’ or teachers won’t be able to see our party pictures allows us to show our ‘friends’ on Facebook, exactly what we've been up to.  Erving Goffman had an idea that “that all participants in social interactions are engaged in certain practices to avoid being embarrassed or embarrassing others. This led to Goffman's dramaturgical analysis. Goffman saw a connection between the kinds of acts that people put on in their daily life and theatrical performances. ” – The quote was taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life . This is also true as you should ask yourself what was the first reason why you created Facebook? The answer is most likely to be because your friend made it and, suggested you should too just so you wouldn't be embarrassed as the only person without it.

Our identities and how we represent ourselves’ seem to have a lot more meaning to it than we originally thought. As we are always becoming older and some more wiser we eventually grow out of certain things we thought we liked and, try edit them out of our lives and some cases unlike off Facebook. It maybe that we aren't creating a different persona on social websites and it just maybe that we are just being more revealing, on site like; Facebook and twitter because it is our own section where we can write or upload whatever we want, with the chance that a friend might hear it or see it as supposed to the real world.