Perception is Reality.....

.....or is it? Recently I was chatting with one of my girlfriends about a mutual friend of ours who seems to have created a whole other personality via social networks. Its as if he has become obsessed with flaunty recent purchases, exploiting relationships to make himself look more popular, or completely over exaggerating an experience he had to make his life seem that much more exciting. We were trying to figure out where this personality may have come from or when it was created, but simply couldn’t. its as if he lives a quasi double life.

After some thought, I realized why he may be doing this, its easy. Social media, and in this specific example twitter especially makes it easy for you to get lost in another reality. You meet, tweet, and hold conversations with people that you don’t even say hello to in passing (yes, I’ve had this personally happen to me). Now don’t get me wrong, I know of plenty of examples where people have been introduced in 140 characters or less, hit it off, and became the best of friends and in one case even began dating, but in all of those instances all parties involved are the same consistent person on twitter and in ‘real’ life. However, I’ve also seen in the case of my friend people create a whole new persona. Through twitter space and time are virtually eradicated, you can communicate anything, to anyone (most of the time a large audience of hundreds of people), at anytime and in the case of my friend it has shifted power into his hands. You see through this persona he has created on twitter he has become an opinion leader. People have started to follow him to stay up to date on the latest parties, clothing trends, music, gossip, etc. he’s created for himself a personality that people are drawn to. I’m happy he has garnished this sort of attention, seeing as he makes his living from such promotion, and I’m sure the experience will be useful should he ever go into marketing.

I wasn’t so much disturbed by our friend’s dual personalities as my friend was, and after some thought I was in a way proud of him. He found an outlet where he could express himself that were beneficial to him. I still have to wonder though, of these new relationships he has formed with his twitter followers how many of them are real and genuine friendships, because it seems to me that he may be losing friends that he has known for qu9ite sometime because they are so annoyed with this glutinous boastful twitter persona.

I found this website to be a fairly accurate and amusing description of all the various twitter personalities you are bound to run into. For more laughs you can also check this one out as well.