Something has always fascinated me.
Why do people have to pretend to be someone they are not on the internet?
Why do they have two "separate" lives?
Are you the same person on the internet as you are in real life or do you have to bullshit everyone for attention? It's just starting to piss me off and I don't know why.
I know I'm me.... who I am on the internet is who I am in real life, and those who have met me, can vouch for that.
Some people maintain highly segmented lives outside of an Internet context
- granted most such people tend to be dishonest and assholes but I don't think that the idea that the Internet itself is to explain for people who live giving facades.
My take is that certain tools allow for a person to behave more incognito and to take up an avatar or persona and that people inclined to do so will. Basically the Internet doesn't create identity duplicity (considering that the terms duplicity and two-faced predate electronic computers) but rather enables those who have a predilection into so behaving.
Having said that a degree of a person having different sides to them, having modified behaviour and attitudes in different contexts. I don't swear as much in church as I do on this forum. When I am publicly speaking and on camera I speak with a lot more unreservedness and qualifiers than in a smaller room setting where we dive into the details (and I swear more than in church but less than in most contexts). There is an extent in which it is absolutely vital for human beings when public facing to adopt a character of themselves. Even outside of a public profile humans tend to have a fairly deep and intimate section of their lives which is very private and the forming of rings as to the extent to which any given group of people are let in to somebodies core persona doesn't seem particularly daft.
- somewhat coincidently I was watching a great clip by Tom Scott about characters versus real people. The extent to which personas on camera
is fictional was canvassed:
whole video is worth watching
