Let's face(book) it...

I live a parallel virtual reality. One, that I'm ashamed to admit, I've been sucked into so deeply it feels like I'll never be able to get out it. What started out as fodder for some sort of vague amusement and peaked as my guilty pleasure, has completed its dreaded cycle and ended now as an obsessive addiction - both the bane and basis of my e-existence. And I'm both ashamed and glad to say that I'm not alone.

In all honesty, the last thing we needed was another platform to form our identities, market ourselves and make friends - trust me, real life is enough (Ask anyone who's ever been through adolescence and they'll vouch for this). Yet it appears that almost every regular Facebook user works hard to try and create and then sustain their online identity - so that it is always an apt indication of who they really are. Which then begs the question who are they, really? In some cruel twist of fate, it appears that the roles have become reversed, and grossly so. Ever heard a comment like "that is SO going on facebook" or "omg new profile pic!" after taking a photo? Sounds all too familiar? Yeah, I had a feeling. It’s almost scary how determined we all are to cement and sustain our online personas as an apparent extension of our real life ones. But that isn’t necessarily how it plays out. Instead, what we we’re actually doing is changing and shaping our online identities into the way we want to be perceived and then attempting to recreate and reflect that in our daily ‘real’ existence.

We've come to manipulate and alter our social existence to feed our other virtual one. So is our Facebook profile really a reflection of who we are? Or do we strive instead in real life to live up to some distorted definition we've created of ourselves?

I don't know about the rest of us...but Mark Zuckerberg, you have created a monster.