As a teenager I never could grasp why people were so judgmental. I’ve always believed that if people just opened their eyes more and looked passed the minor flaws they would a radiant, incredible person they could love.
But as I have gotten older I’ve realized that this is not always true, and sometimes you have to be conscious about who and where you share the stories of your life with. My first real experience with this issue happened on MySpace.
Myself and others around my age delved into the social networking world with no boundaries, fears or responsibilities. I became friends with anybody who would accept me and posted every picture I ever took. I would spend hours fixing my page to look just so and talking with new and interesting people.
Then I started getting stalkers, people stealing my photos and other strange occurrences. I became so disgusted with it that I finally deleted my page entirely and stopped using it altogether. Of course, a few months later, Facebook changed all of that.
To be honest, I have never had any major problems with Facebook, but when I took this position early in the summer, one of the first things my advisor suggested I do was to look over my profile, pictures, etc. and delete anything that was not entirely appropriate.
Needless to say, my inner teenager was crushed. Everything on there was my life. I’m not doing keg stands half naked at a house party. Why does it matter if I have a glass of wine at dinner with my friends? Why would someone go out of their way to find me on there anyways? And who are they to judge me anyways?
Most of us are aware of the serious dangers of social networking. Don’t meet up with people you don’t know. Don’t put pictures that show nudity or are pornographic in nature. Don’t put on your status where you are every minute of the day – robbers and stalkers!
We sometimes forget though, that other people are watching us as well. There are 500 million active users on Facebook alone, according to www.facebook.com, and anyone of them can at the very least see your profile picture.
I’m not sure where exactly the line is drawn when it comes to what we should put on these sites. I struggled with several photos from events and places in my life that I thought were interesting but had a good chance of being frowned upon.
You can’t make everybody happy, but it is important to try and put your best face forward to show the social networking world just how great and responsible you really are.