In polite society, there are three general subjects to avoid in a first meeting: politics, money and religion. The list of things people complain about on Facebook is the same list.
In this day and age we rarely wonder what anyone thinks or feels on any particular topic, because you are a few clicks away from discovering more than you ever wanted to know.
I don’t understand why we need to constantly identify ourselves.
There’s an episode of the popular TV show “How I Met Your Mother” in which they talk about the walls going up among society. We now see each other and ourselves through virtual walls. Our most important beliefs, that it used to take people time and trust to learn, are now out there for strangers to read and comment on.
I hate this but I still do it. A lot of people hate constantly updating others, but they do it anyways. We as a culture cannot stop blabbing on and on about our interests, beliefs and opinions. Despite the fact that we hate everyone else’s opinions we assume, “Mine is different,” and, “Mine is better.”
There is a disconnect between what we are comfortable with people knowing about our lives and what we are willing to learn about other people. Social networks are an ingenious creation; they present an opportunity to connect with anyone and everyone in the world. It offers us the potential for constant pen pals on every side of an ever-shrinking planet. Yet we use it to brand ourselves in things we used to be afraid of talking about.
The point is we have no personalities anymore. We have lost ourselves in the idea that everything we can know about anyone is online; that we have no real life unless we can Tweet it or Facebook it to someone.
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