Maybe it's because I don't hang out with a lot of teenagers on social media, or encourage the teenagers I care about to use social media...I hadn't thought about the phenomenon of lying on social media until I read a description of it in Arthur Brooks' Conservative Heart.
For my e-friends and e-acquaintances, I think, and for me, social media works differently than the way it works for the people Brooks describes, or the ones @angela describes here:
For me and the people I know, our social media image isn't a lie; it's an advertisement. You don't advertise everything about yourself, or even every thing about your products. You advertise things you want the world to know.
I have seen a couple of blogs where people (Taylor Swift comes to mind) just posted pictures of everything in their closets. Y'know what, I didn't even recognize this as bragging. Because TS did it on Tsu, I thought, "She's trying to get paid for the maximum number of posts per day." Seeing a young woman do it on an unpaid Blogspot, I thought, "She must have promised some relative she'd post something to prove she was alive, and this is all she can think of, poor kid."
On my blogs, I post a lot of links. To somebody out there that might seem like a sort of bragging, too--"She's showing off how much she reads, or what interesting e-friends she has." To me it's always felt like a sad excuse for not being able to buy the material and publish it in a Real Magazine, actually, although after a few apologies for "reading my e-mail at" readers I've been informed that sharing links was what the first and "best" blogs were all about.
Maybe all blogging is bragging, on some level. Even if what's in the blogger's mind is "I have to collect my payout for the day" or "I have to prove to my aunt that I'm still at this school," in a way that might be considered boasting.
(The computer center is closing for the day. I apologize...I'll have more to say about this in the morning.)
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