Talk:Sharon Lee

Hi Sharon,

Good job on your identity article. I can relate to your desire to be short and concise on Facebook; more information does not necessarily mean more accurate, and being concise can still show aspects of your true self.

You seem to be very confident of which aspects of your profile are representative of your offline identity. There is no doubt you see yourself as a "no-nonsense" person, and that in developing your Facebook profile you have chosen to express yourself similarly. However, you are a complex human with feelings and thoughts, do you ever think you are filtering out important parts of yourself because you don't want to break this "conciseness" paradigm? For example, when your friend asked you how "Ann Arbor life" has been, you almost seem to make the choice to not interact with her. Your reasoning for replying in such a brief manner is that "Nothing has happened to Ann Arbor in the past year that she's been gone. No hurricane for us." Do you think that mentioning anything less than a hurricane would be uninteresting or wasted energy? I find it hard to believe that your friend only asked you because she wanted to know if an event on par with a hurricane had occurred.

I also thought your thoughts on profile pictures was interesting. I'm curious how you would answer the question, What is the purpose of a profile picture? You say that photos of people with their friends or photos that are "muddled" make it "hard to tell who the person is and what the photo means." While a straight-on headshot makes it easier to tell what someone looks like, does it convey more meaning and insight into their identity? I feel like, even if I can't see the person very clearly, Facebook profile pictures that have more going on sometimes help me to learn more about what someone is like.

Sharon,

I enjoyed reading this article. One of my favorite sentences was "In neither of those situations was I feeling very strongly about anything; I would say that I was in approximately the same mood when I wrote both statuses", probably because I can relate to that but also because it is an interesting insight into whatever disparity between the real-you and online-you might exist. I noticed two different trends in how you described the way that you wrote on Facebook, one being that you use concise, to-the-point phrasing and the other that you are often sarcastic in your posts. I would have liked to know the contexts in which one or the other is applicable. Your shifting views in privacy were interesting to me as well. One sentence that I enjoyed, though I'm not sure if it was supposed to be a joke, was "My Facebook is supposed to have general information, not be a book about me" being that it is Face...book...heh...heh...Anyway I'd like to know why you had this change in ideas about how you wanted people to perceive you online.

Your discussion of profile pictures was insightful in that it is very different from my philosophy, which is that it acts as something that sets the mood for the visual aesthetic that you give off to profile visitors. You insist that the photo is meant to 100% show that it is you. What I took away from your article was that the paradigm under which you operate on Facebook is that it is somewhat like a public diary and not a necessarily valid vessel for personal expression. Since you work for a magazine and play the violin, you no doubt have creative interests and it is likely the case that you prefer expressing yourself in those ways instead. I would have liked to read more about that, however it was, to some degree, implicit in the article.

Best,

Tom