In David Weinburger’s piece, Small Pieces Loosely Joined he looks at the way we depict ourselves online compared to how we present ourselves in real life. Do we really have an online personality?

Weinburger talks about this online anonymity that allows users to create their own profile, often one that exaggerates or completely re-creates our real offline personality.

I don’t think any Internet user, especially those that use sites such at Facebook or Twitter can claim they haven’t slightly altered there online form to be more appealing. Even the content we choose to share or not share impacts the way others view them online. We choose to share the positives and choose to not share the negatives. I argue that this creates an ‘online personality’.

However, having said this, it’s true that humans also present different versions of the self in the physical world. The way you act when interacting with your family at the dinner table compared to how you act when having some drinks with your friends on the weekend will be vastly different! I think the point is though that the internet makes us actively think about self representation by giving us the tools to easily construct who it is we want the world to believe we are.