In fact, it’s quite the contrary.

the lie © Raffaella Loro

For all the huffing and puffing I was doing today about trying to engage in the real world, look at me here now, doing just the opposite. I'm venting online, to no one in particular. But that's the beauty of these tools, you have the ability to share with an anonymous audience (well mostly). You can say things you wouldn't ordinarily. You can embellish how you want others to see you. This information trickles out slowly, to be discovered at some later date or finding its way into some RSS feed of friends and strangers. Some people know the real you and make inferences as to why you have written what you have written, but those strangers, all they have are the bits and pieces of the trail that you have left for them. Who you are is entirely a construct of what is stored on the internet. It's fascinating how these tools can serve the dual purpose of providing another outlet for interaction with those who know us and establish us as caricatures of ourselves to those strangers who might come across our online identities. And that's why I like the internet. Sure there are times when you feel like you're living two lives, one online and one not. But what if you feel that the real you is a hybrid of the two? I am no less false online than I am in person, but neither is more real than the other. That's something to say about my generation I guess, our outlets for expression have expanded to this abstract plane of information and we can be equally concerned with how people perceive us there. In fact, sometimes it is easier to express ourselves online. The rules are different here. I doubt people could handle this much intensity face to face.