When We Say "I," We Begin to Lie

In class, we briefly discussed the problems involved with labeling oneself. While I believe the subject came up during our debate about skin, the concepts seem very relevant to a discussion of facebook and its brethren. Facebook makes an interesting case study of the limitations of self-description. It's funny that we can describe so much of ourselves in a profile, yet come up with an end result that is oddly generic. I once saw a facebook profile that filled in all of the fields with descriptions of categories that tend to make up a typical facebook profile. For instance, under music, it included entries like "something so obscure that I will be the only one on facebook to have heard of it" and "a cheesey 90's song that will serve as an inside joke with the rest of the facebook community." It was pretty amusing. I was reminded of that bit of satire as I thought about the self-concious, constructed nature of your average facebook profile. People only put on facebook the information that they want people to know (or think.)