@chrisdtc101
The explosion of social media over the past several years has given people with access to new technology and the Internet to live a second life. This second life takes place in a virtual world filled with interactive places such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and games like World of Warcraft that allow us to create and customize our avatar. Coleman and Shirky state in “Hello Avatar” that, “an avatar is computer-generated figure controlled by a person via a computer.” The avatar is customized to our liking and gives people the chance to live what they would consider their ideal life: The life they wanted but could never have in the real world.
Media changes us because we can hide behind a computer and express our thoughts while avoiding any confrontation if we want to. We can make friends we would likely never make in real life. Either a type of person who wouldn’t want to associate ourselves with in real life, or someone who lives across the world and would never enter our environment without the Internet. Interacting through people on a computer gives us anonymity and allows us to pick and choose what the world sees of us. On social media websites like Facebook and Twitter, we can portray our highlights and the happy moments in our lives while leaving out the bad parts of our lives. This can alter the perception people on the Internet have of us.
The Internet changes us because it gives us the power to create a different interpretation of who we are. We only have to tell people bits and pieces of ourselves, and we can make ourselves seem more socially acceptable or more popular on the Internet that we may be in real life. The Internet gives us a chance to escape into our ideal world and for most of us, our ideal world is not the one we’re currently living in.