BLOGGING REFLECTION

As I spend more time than is advisable blogging (not on this blog in particular, but in the deeper recesses of the internet), I am well acquainted with the differences between one's online persona and their IRL (in real life) self. For many people, the internet is a way to mainline validation and attention. People also like to make their lives out to be better than the real deal. This could manifest as paring their online presence down to accounts of their fun times with friends and selfies of themselves from their best angles, with optimal lighting, or as outright lying on social media. This behavior is understandable. Who wants to broadcast their existential crisis' and emotional breakdowns on social media?

More people than you'd expect, in fact, myself among them. I maintain a blog on the micro-blogging platform Tumblr, and my followers are privy to a great deal of my personal life. This is mostly because nobody I know IRL follows me there. It's liberating to be able to spill details about my emotions and have a cushion of understanding like-minded individuals to reassure me, without having to go back to school with those people the next day. There are things I tell the internet that I wouldn't tell my father, the person who's closest to me in the world. It feels good, too, to document these emotions and know that someone has seen them and acknowledged them, validated them. I blog about art and my life, and people listen, and it's comforting. I don't have to see exactly how someone reacts to something I post, either, which takes a lot of the awkwardness out of sharing these kinds of intimate details.

This is not to say that the benefit of not being able to see someone's reaction to something you post is always a good thing. It opens the doors to cyberbullying, for one thing. People find it easier to be mean in the blog-o-sphere, where it's harder to see concrete consequences of your actions. It also robs one of a certain social sensibility. Without facial cues, body language and vocal intonation to read, you lose a lot of depth in a conversation. The internet has found ways around this issue, such as emojis, abnormal capitalization and and creative use of punctuation. The deficit, however, still remains.