Who are you?

Who are you?

Creating a social media profile involves creating a persona whether you like it or not.   The personal you create may or may not be a true representation of who you really are.  There is a very wide spectrum of how closely a person's online persona matches their actual life. Some work folks take special care to insure that their online self is genuine and other take that same amount of care to appear to be something that is far from genuine.  That is the magic of social media, you can be whoever you want to be.

I think it basically boils down to three types of social media personas, you have the two extremes and the middle of the road folks.  Most of us I say fall in that middle ground.  The extremes being, the person that puts any and everything on their social media page and the person that is very selective and goes out of their way to slant who they are perceived to be.

 The everything people includes those that air all their dirty laundry and frequently post about very personal topics along with all of the mundane and insignificant things they do on a day by day minute by minute basis.  After viewing this person's page, you know exactly who they are, what their opinions are, who they like, who they don't like, where they went where, where they are going and on and on. They have no sense of privacy and I believe quite enjoy having an audience to post their lives to.  They will readily post the gory details of a relationship breakup or how much they hate their boss at work.

The other extreme consist of those users that are extremely selective in what they post. They can be categorized into two sub groups though. The first is the person that is very private and only posts very impersonal things. They are also the ones that are very bothered when someone else posts something about them or tags them in a group photo.  They are with have a very distinct line drawn between their personal life an what is broadcast on social media.  The second type encompasses the people that relish the social media attention and take great pains to portray themselves in a very specific light.  They may go so far as to totally fabricate stories or post of events they never attended, vacations they never took, post picture with people they don't really know and so on and so forth.  The people are not really happy with their true lives so they basically create an alternate version within the realm of social media. This may be for good or bad but incorrect all they same.

Lastly we have where I thing the majority of us fall, the middle of the roaders.  This is the group that is fine with posting personal things but not too personal.  We think twice before make a post  and generally don't have ulterior motives when posting.