Do you only review certain albums, books, and restaurants?
Are your tweets pre-meditated, eluding the entire point of Twitter?
Is it a realistic possibility that you’ll neglect to check in on Gowalla at CVS–but are relentlessly fighting for most visits at the Troubadour?
These days, it’s easy to post what we’re up to. It’s also easy to do it in real time and incorporate text, links, photos, and video. This makes it inevitable to tell the story of where we are, who we’re with and what we’ve been doing.
Our online lives — creative stories in themselves — are told in a very non-linear and roundabout way. Follow me, friend me, see where I’ve been, read my review, rate my post. Learn about my sense of humor, hear me out on the things that tick me off. See my artsy photos from last night’s party.
Some call it life streaming and awesome. Others may find it fleeting, superfluous, and well — kinda lame!
However you see it, our miniature stories are curated and self-selected by us to be published. They’re timestamped and scattered; woven from the snippets we impulsively choose to reveal. They create the ultimate narrative of who we are.
Yet with the ability to choose what we say, the possibility of evolving into a fictional character becomes all too easy. We can skin back the fluff to become the most presentable, the most agreeable, the most well-informed and resourceful person ever.
And by choosing what we’d like to reveal, the truth about our identity becomes blurred by the character we subconsciously like to perceived as being.
Dapper intellect. Family man. Cultured and resourceful. Popular, in-the-know. Obsessed with, I don’t know, cupcakes. You get the idea!
Someday, we might be able to aggregate our daily crumbs of activity. If so, will they amount to the ultimate online historical profile? Or are we just dropping snippets of subconscious by-product — patternless and ridiculous to assign any meaning to?
When things aren’t going right for someone, it’s often difficult to tell from clues left online. Sometimes it’s a string of posts with a certain sentiment, or an abrupt change of tone. This is usually precluded by a downturn in participation. The same goes for being busy with…life. There are too many real variables to tell if online actions can reflect true behavior.
But maybe, sharing online collects our peaks more than our valleys. Or, it serves as a respite of idle time for the bored, for the curious, the eager.
So, back to these bits of paper strewn across the internet. Do they add up to anything substantial?
Someday our kids will be able to see our social timelines. Like a diary, will we wish we had posted more? Maybe we’ll wish we had posted less. Way less.
Or maybe, we’ll we wish we had been more honest with ourselves, knowing that someday, these stories could be pieced together to form an interactive story of who were were — or who we really wanted to be.