Who are you really?

In class we talked about how creating your identity is different online when in adolescence as compared to adulthood. I wanted to expand on what I wrote for the in class writing and so I can up my blog count for the project.

I believe that the Internet is greatly affecting how we create our identities in our adolescence. I’m going to sound really old here but when I was a kid we didn’t really have the Internet so you spent a lot more time outside with people, playing baseball, hanging out with kids around the neighborhood etc. Basically you had to go outside and interact with people to create friends. By that I’m trying to say that you basically created your identity by whom you hung out with and what you did and there was no real way to fake that identity. With technology now, kids, or really anyone for that matter, can create their own identity online that is completely different from whom they really are. You see multiple people that create their own “online identity.”

I’m not sure if we will watch the film in this class but the film “Catfish” deals with this online identity issue. In the film one of the filmmakers falls in love with a young girl who lives half way across the country. She can sing, is attractive, shares the same interests, seemingly the perfect girl. As the days go on their relationship gets more and more serious and soon the three friends making this film take off to go meet her in person. What they discover is that this young girl he has been talking to really is a middle-aged mom who had just created an online persona. When confronted she basically breaks down in tears saying she couldn’t stop living that second life.

What I’m trying to get at with that little bit about the movie is that I thought that technology only really affected the way younger people create their identities, but it affects adults just as much.

The tools on the Internet just make it too easy for people to change you they really are. Or maybe it allows them to be their true selves. Since nobody knows who you truly are online you can do or say anything. Some people use the Internet to try things they are too afraid to try in real life. Others discover things they find out they truly love by finding it on the Internet. So this whole muddying of your identity that they Internet can cause can be used for good.

So overall I find that the Internet creates issues for people trying to figure out their identities no matter what age. For kids it creates problems in creating their identities. With adults, it creates problems in that it challenges what people thought their identities were. Sometimes this can be for the better as people find things they really love and sometimes it can be for the worse as people create second lives on the Internet. Either way it’s making it a hell of a lot more confusing to really find out who somebody is.