Will Allan… let’s see who this guy is. Wow, there are tons of Will Allan’s on here, no surprise there, I guess. Ok, this one must be him. He’s 19 years old and goes to Dartmouth. He’s from Southampton, and it looks like he’s in a relationship that he wants people to know about. Both his profile picture and his cover photo have quite obvious film-reminiscent filters… what a try hard.
I think my Facebook profile paints a fairly accurate picture of MOST of the main parts of my life, namely, art and rowing. A great deal of my time in the past four years has been invested in rowing, as evidenced by the vast majority of photos in which I’m tagged. Likewise, art has always been a big part of me life, which is clear to see through most of the photos I have posted.
However, the Facebook version of me it also misses a lot. For example, my family and school are also big parts of my life, parts that are largely absent from the Facebook version of me. There are maybe two pictures of myself with my family, and non of myself sitting in class or writing a paper; after all, who wants to see that? Perhaps no one does, but as a full-time student, school is obviously a pretty big part of my life.
One of the biggest differences between real me and digital me is “friends.” The Facebook version of me is seemingly very social. He has 1,063 friends, is tagged in 311 photos and 26 videos, and “likes” 1,417 pages. The real version of me, however, is quite different. I am very introverted, somewhat reclusive, and have only a few very close friends.
How do you use social networking websites, and why do you find it effective or ineffective for achieving your communication needs?
If I said that I use social networking websites for anything other than entertainment, I’d be lying. Most of my time on Facebook (which is admittedly a lot of time) is spent scrolling through my newsfeed, looking at friend’s pictures, and reading too many of the advertisement-laden, time-wasting articles. I do occasionally find it useful and effective for some kinds of communication, such as asking a classmate what I missed when I was out, but I think these slight benefits do not outweigh the negatives.
How is your communication pattern different from when you aren’t texting or using Facebook?
As I started to discuss above, I do not do much actual communicating on Facebook. I’ll do a little instant messaging and commenting here and there, but most of my usage consists of mindless scrolling.
What rhetorical skills do you think using social networking websites has helped you build?
None. If anything, using social networking websites has hurt my rhetorical skills. Other than giving me opportunities to practice my nearly useless sub-par ability to compose witty remarks, Facebook has not improved my communication or rhetorical skills.
How has the way you communicate on social media sites changed the way you communicate when you’re off-line?
This is a hard question to answer. I’ve had accounts on various social media sites for about four years, and so it is hard to tell what kind of impact that has had on my off-line communications. I have noticed a decrease in my attention span, however. I don’t know if it has been a direct result of my instant-gratification-oriented, distracting social media use, but I don’t seem to be able to focus on certain things, like books, the way I used to prior to using social networks.
What deliberate choices have you made in crafting your online persona? How are our public and private personas different? Why? For what purposes?
I think most people, myself included, like to think that they do not make an effort to craft any certain persona online. It is nice to think that one is completely himself online, and that there are no discrepancies between the real and virtual versions of himself. This, of course, is simply not true (at least for most people). Something as simple as choosing one photo as a profile picture over another involves some sort of choice about how you wish to be portrayed- how you want to form your persona. Still, when we make these choices about what pictures to upload or what pages to “like,” the question is a little less direct than “how do I want my persona to be?” The thought process goes more like “I think I look better in this picture than in the other one, and in this one I can show off my girlfriend.” Vain as it is, these are choices I admit to making. This is an unfortunate inherent flaw in social networking, I think it is (ironically) very conducive to this kind of self-oriented thinking.