Talk:Alissa Chan

Hi Alissa,

I think that this piece is very well done. Whenever I found myself wondering something such as “why are you mentioning this? or how does this make you feel?” you answered my question within the next few paragraphs. I liked how you first talked about what you put on your profile and then worked off of that to talk about how this relates to you as a person in real life vs. online. My favorite thing that you wrote was, “As long as we don't deceive others in the way we represent ourselves, we don't need to reveal everything about our personality to be "true to ourselves" and other people.” I find this to be very true, and I feel like the evidence you have presented about your profile supports your feeling of this. It seems like you show a decent part of yourself on Facebook, and you believe that what you present is true, but it doesn’t show everything about you, and you are OK with this. I feel like I do the same thing and I agree with you completely, my Facebook doesn’t show everything about me, but why should that mean that it’s false or unauthentic, good point!

I guess my only criticism would be that I would have liked to see more of an introduction that would have laid out what you were going to say. Like I said, I liked how you answered all the questions that came up for me while I read this, but it would have been nice to know that those questions were going to be answered from the get go. Other than that though, very nice job, I enjoyed reading your article.

-Mara

Hey Alissa,

I really enjoyed reading your piece. You had a very friendly and chatty style that I liked. Your writing was similar to the way someone might casual chat with a friend, which made it really easy to read, though you still dove deep into the topic.

What I enjoyed the most was the fact that you had a very strong, definite answer to the question. You know your own opinion, and you made a strong argument. By the end of it, I felt like I really understood your point of view, and you made an extremely good point. Specifically, your line "we’re only as deceptive or authentic online as we are in real life" really made me think, because that's a perspective that I hadn't considered before. But you're definitely right that we portray ourselves in a certain way (or try to) at every point in our lives. I think it would've been interesting to hear your thoughts on the information from the "Friendship and Intimacy Online" lecture that we went over a few weeks ago. Specifically, what you think about Cocking's words on how "the uncooperative aspects of self" are necessary to form relationships. This isn't entirely related, since you made a point of saying that your personality online is similar to how you'd treat an acquaintance rather than a friend. But your paragraph about authenticity made me think of it, and I feel as though it could've been an interesting thing to tie in.

I really liked the way that you analyzed the different aspects of your personality. I feel as though it gave me a really good sense of your personality, which I enjoyed. Providing that information also struck me as a really good way of setting up your point - that the things you post do reveal parts of who you are. I do think that this could have been tied in sooner. Initially I didn't quite understand the purpose behind the different subheadings. Your message didn't really come through until the final section.

That being said, you did a fantastic job, and it was clear that you put a lot of thought into it.

Kathryn Clark

Hi Alissa,

Good job on this post. I want to say that, when I read your first few paragraphs, I got the exact same question as you raised later - do you actually filter too much on the contents you posted to be authentic or representative to your self. And you answered that question very comprehensively and convincingly in the later part of the post - although the contents didn’t touch too much on your personal interests or opinions, the way you choose to manage the contents well represent the personality of you. And in some ways, it helps people to better know you than simply knowing what hobbies or thoughts do you have. I think whether or how we choose to filter the contents highly depends on how we define the functions of the social media for ourselves. You want your posts to be positive and to enlighten people around you instead of using it to do immediate communications or to share thoughts and interests. You prefer to do it face to face I got it. From this perspective, I think your way of managing online profile works very well for your purpose. In addition, in the last part of the article, you brought the topic to another level by stating that whether the online profile is authentic or not is not about what kinds of interactions, online or face-to-face, we prefer but that whether we lied about ourselves - whether we make up things that we don't really have and whether we do the posts simply for the posts, which is really enlightening.

I think the only weakness of this post is the structure. I hope you can somehow mention the main point of the article in the very beginning so that I can read the rest of it while thinking about the issue. Also, perhaps you want to shorten the length of the first few paragraphs or at least have fewer branches for that part and work more on the discussion part to make it more organized. But all in all, great post!

By Zhewen Song