Is This Picture Facebook-Worthy?
One of the most popular social media sites today is Facebook. It seems as though almost everyone you speak to has a Facebook account. Facebook, and social media in general, gives people the ability to share their lives with others via the internet. Whether you’re sharing this information with friends, family, or strangers, only you get to decide what you want to share. The interesting thing about this is that you could end up creating a false image of yourself by accident. By sharing only your best-looking pictures, your most interesting stories, and your funniest jokes, everyone else on Facebook is only seeing the best of you. This misrepresentation of oneself occurs with almost everyone, though. Of course, you’re not going to post pictures that you think you look horrible in or post a status that you think no one will like, so false images on Facebook occur pretty naturally. Only those who know you personally will know just how representative your Facebook account is of you. Depending on how much you share on Facebook, though, there might not be enough information to create a complete image of you at all. So, although Facebook accounts can be misleading in this way, there’s no real solution to this problem. Your true identity not being fully displayed on Facebook isn’t a problem for those who know you personally, but can be a guessing game for those who don’t. Questions such as: “Does she really look like that in real life?” “Does he still go to school there or has he just not updated his profile?” and “Who are all |
those people in her pictures?” occur on a regular basis in the world of Facebook. When meeting new people on Facebook, finding out what someone is really like can be tricky. Sure, you can look through their pictures, friends, and interests, but knowing how much of that is actually accurate to their personality is hard to determine. This is, of course, only a problem in the beginning. Once you get to know a person through conversations and actually meeting them, the guessing game begins to fade.
How women are portrayed on Facebook is due, in large, to how they present themselves. One major way women present themselves on Facebook is through their pictures. Others on Facebook can only perceive you based on what you share and based on how they take it. How much a woman reveals herself in her pictures on Facebook varies greatly from woman to woman. Since inappropriate pictures may not be seen as inappropriate to all, some women question why they get the responses they do on some of the pictures that they post. Women may get offended and claim that the pictures they posted in no way elicited that type of response. Pictures of women that most would find revealing clutter the internet today. The fact that this is becoming “normal” may be the reason why some women don’t see pictures of themselves as inappropriate in any way. Even though women on Facebook may not be able to change how others view their pictures, they, at least, have the ability to create their own identity by choosing the pictures that they would like to share. |