Me, Myself & My Tweets

In the New York Times Peggy Orenstein Wrote “I Tweet, Therefore I Am”. The strange part was that I used the exact same statement a few days prior to reading it while discussing social media with friends.

Yes we have this other person that tweets and facebooks (If this was not a word now it is). Is it us? Or is it whom we would like to be, or is it even whom we do not want to be? Yes some people do want to show the world a different persona. Now, you can choose the character you want to publicly display you are your own media consultant. Even parts of you can have their own character now, your behind even gets to Facebook, yes, try having your Blackberry in your back pocket unlocked.

I admit I do not have a personal twitter or Facebook account, I have not bloomed yet. I know how they work though and I get to know what people are up to through my work's accounts and I really think that most people are not whom they claim to be. These are just the new tools that we use to be accepted, the new tools we use to belong, it is high school all over again only this time high school has no age limit.

You have the popular athlete and the oh-so-pretty cheer leader and you are most probably the acne infested nerd trying to find a place for yourself among them. If you are not too confident about your looks (page in this case) you try very hard to appeal through the copy paste quotes you find through Google, or the very deep and profound statements that you spend hours articulating, some even try humor (the class joker) and others try promiscuity (The school slut). At the end of the day it is how many followers you have, how many friends are on your list and how many retweets you get that determine whether or not you will be invited to prom night. The more friends the merrier, even if you don't know half of them, nor care for that matter to either know them or know about them. It is all about quantity. The thing is, the bigger the audience the more we care about what we sound like and how they will all perceive us. Each one is trying to manipulate their image and how they are perceived. Another marketplace where we need to market ourselves only here we are hidden behind our screens and our words, hidden behind the luxury of the delay time we have to choose our words and polish our thoughts. Here there is no fear of the sudden burst of words that we cannot take back, have a faux pas and the remove button is there to aid you re-polish your manipulated image.

I don't know if i will ever have an account on any social media service, it is too much work for me it is just another hurdle along the way of getting to know ourselves that will only beguile us and misguide us into thinking we do know when we really should be looking within.