Facebook Reflection

When I first started to create my fake Facebook profile, I was toying with the idea of creating a profile I could make fun of with my friends. I decided on the name Brittany Lawrence because, to be honest, the first thought that comes to my mind with that name is rich, blonde girl who happens to be a cheerleader. I was even thinking of posting incredibly dumb stuff, paired with a bunch of naïve comments. Then I realized, this wasn’t the point of the exercise. Facebook itself, as we have discussed in class, is a place in which you show people what you want them to see (except in the case of those 3 or 4 pictures in which you don’t look your best, to put it nicely), but it all changes when it is a fake Facebook; a profile in which your “friends” can’t put a face to the name. I decided to forgo the airhead profile and go with a more meaningful one.

In my fa(k)ebook profile, I want to represent an artistic person. Someone who thrives in the arts, especially that of painting and drawing. This is because in Panama (where I’m from), an interest in art is only seen as a hobby; never as something you could do for a living. I am a business major and I really like it, but a part of me has always wanted to pursue a career in arts, even if it leads to me sitting in a corner of NYC, painting random buildings and trying to make ends meet. My parents would have never approved of this idea, so I did what pleased them, a more conventional choice. In my fake profile, I am going to try to portray how my life would have been had I gone for the more artistic path.

This all influenced my profile choices, even if in a small way. I picked Norman, Oklahoma as my hometown because I have a cousin there that went against his parents’ wishes for him to study Law and is on his way to become a successful artist, at least in my opinion. I decided to upload photos that in my opinion represent hope in an artistic way, and some that were more on the funny side, because not everything in life has to be artistic or not.

My first point in this reflection is going to be about the way we see the things in these profiles.

Berger (1972) states that “the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe”. I consider this quote relevant for this fakebook reflection, because if it were not for the fact that we know these are fake profiles, we would probably be laughing at the person with the name “Dick Moby” or “Pika Chu” and judging them for having a different sense of humor, but in this project we think “wow, what an original name, did not think of it”. The whole secrecy of the assignment, takes away some of the seriousness of the identities in my opinion. If one of the people I am friends with on my real facebook changed her name to Pika Chu, I would seriously reconsider our friendship.