Many of the feelings and concerns that you have about Facebook really resonate with me. I joined Facebook when I had just left my home province of Alberta to venture to Vancouver as a teenager in 2007. At the time, Facebook was the perfect way to keep in contact with family and friends (mostly from high school). As time has passed and I have become older, I have inevitably become very different from many of the people I originally added to Facebook. I too am angered often by things posted on my newsfeed by people that I hardly know. Why do we allow ourselves to be surrounded by strangers in the Facebook world in a way that we probably would not allow in the real world? For myself, I think it is not only a way to feel connected to my past and hometown, but as a way to gauge what others in my age group are doing/accomplishing. Who is in university, who is getting married, what is normal for my age? I think Facebook allows us to create these expectations based on what we see. This is extremely problematic because as you pointed out, these versions of ourselves are not the full picture. Most people are posting the idealized versions of themselves on Facebook, and that is what forms our ideas of what is normal, which I think can ultimately be very dangerous.
Many of the feelings and concerns that you have about Facebook really resonate with me. I joined Facebook when I had just left my home province of Alberta to venture to Vancouver as a teenager in 2007. At the time, Facebook was the perfect way to keep in contact with family and friends (mostly from high school). As time has passed and I have become older, I have inevitably become very different from many of the people I originally added to Facebook. I too am angered often by things posted on my newsfeed by people that I hardly know. Why do we allow ourselves to be surrounded by strangers in the Facebook world in a way that we probably would not allow in the real world? For myself, I think it is not only a way to feel connected to my past and hometown, but as a way to gauge what others in my age group are doing/accomplishing. Who is in university, who is getting married, what is normal for my age? I think Facebook allows us to create these expectations based on what we see. This is extremely problematic because as you pointed out, these versions of ourselves are not the full picture. Most people are posting the idealized versions of themselves on Facebook, and that is what forms our ideas of what is normal, which I think can ultimately be very dangerous.