Talk:Andrew Katcha

Andrew - I really enjoyed reading your autobiography! The voice of your avatar (and yourself) truly showed throughout your writing which made it really fun and interesting to read. The way you chose to categorize your biography flowed and made a lot of sense, for example I liked how in your "About myself from a view" category that you further broke it down into categories discussing how you looked to someone before and after they became friends with you on facebook. The seriousness of your purpose really showed through when you discussed how you don't like how other people choose to share unhappy content such as rants and political beliefs. Earlier in your autobiography you had talked about how you are never unhappy, and only see the best things in life, so to me the fact that you don't understand why others choose to share that kind of content made a lot of sense, and revealed your deep thought about how you choose to exist and engage on facebook. I also really liked your "Two Truths and a Lie" section, though I am not sure if I guessed which one was the lie correctly. You could consider explaining which one was the lie further to make it a bit more clear. But overall, really great job!! -Abbey Warren

Second Comment

Hey Andrew--nice work with your autobiography. I find your restrictiveness on your Facebook fascinating. As someone who has moved in the opposite direction recently (away from restrictiveness on Facebook), I find your rationale for your curation particularly interesting. I thought the part about you discussing how you try to repel people interested in making virtual friendships with you particularly fascinating. I'm not sure I entirely understand your reasoning for not wanting virtual friendships, though. You talked a little bit about how real-life friendships are more intimate than "outside relationships"--but I'm not sure how that relates to virtual friendships. Does that mean you believe you can't maintain an intimate online friendship? I would love to hear more rationale about this reasoning, because I believe the opposite. All the hard work you put into your curation also interests me. Recently, I've moved away from caring too much about who sees what on my Facebook profile--and it's extremely liberating. It's a lot less to stress over, and a lot less work since you don't have to put any effort into curation or special filters. My question to you is, what is the cost/benefit breakdown of heavily curating/filtering your Facebook profile versus not curating at all? What makes it more beneficial to put a substantial amount of effort into the curation process? I'd love to engage further in this topic. - Nicole

Third Comment

Andrew, The tone of your autobiography is very compelling. I really like the contrast you create between your avatar's narrative and your avatar's "owner." This does a great job of emphasizing your underlying message that "I am a tool that another Andrew uses to put his best foot forward." Additionally, you did a very thorough job of describing the ways in which you construct your profile online. For a fairly short autobiography, I feel that I gained a good understanding of how you interact with Facebook and the ways in which you construct your online identity. It would have been interesting, however, if you went into a bit more detail contrasting your online identity to your authentic identity. You alluded to the fact that your Facebook profile tends to reflect your best traits/happiest self, but how does this compare to your offline identity? In what qualitative ways do those two identities differ besides your online reflecting your best self? Overall, this was a very interesting read, however. Jordan