With millions and millions of users all around the globe, facebook has singled itself out as the most prominent social-networking website of our time. Today we live in a world where people have a difficult time distinguishing our real lives from our technological, online lives that include sites such as facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc. Although such sites aim to foster individuality, as they enable us to post our own thoughts, feelings, information, and photos, the irony is that sites such as these, facebook especially, often cause individuality to suffer and make it hard for people to remember what it’s like to exist as individuals in a real world, as opposed to the identities they choose to either create for themselves or embellish via sites such as facebook.
Facebook makes it possible for any individual to have as many as 5,000 friends on the site. The chances that a facebook user has even 1000 friends and knows all 1000 of those friends are slim. However, because of the existence of a “news feed” on facebook, we are able to see what any of our friends--even those who are basically strangers to us--are up to at any given moment. Thus, we form judgments about people that we barely know, even if those judgments do not contain truth and accuracy. The way people represent themselves on facebook may often mirror how they are in person, but in many cases the information posted on a facebook page does not measure up to a person’s real-life persona. Because I am friends with so many people on facebook that I may have met one time, or do not know at all, I know all these tidbits about their lives that they post on their pages. Then when I see them in person, it has the same effect as passing a celebrity on the street--we know so many details of various peoples’ lives it comes as a shock when we actually see them in the flesh. We’re so accustomed to seeing news about them on facebook that we forget they exist as real people in a non-internet world.
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