more on the personal

This week, I had a little experiment in non-self created identity. My friends, who have entirely too much free time decided to create 2 separate facebook accounts for me (which, as we've been over, is sort of the myspace equivalent). They made my interests into such wonderful things as "vomitting out car windows" and "cow-tipping" (neither of which is true, just so you know). Additionally, they put up a series of atrocious photos of me and friended over 300 people, mostly freshman boys who I've never seen. They had fun creating my identity becuase it was safer than changing there's. Through my accounts they could comment on other people's profiles such things as "you're cute, wanna bang" which they were probably thinking, but wouldn't say if their own personas were at stake. I realize this is terribly sophmoric but it made me think even more about what makes a persona. Is it how we express ourselves? How we act? How we dress? Whether or not we smile while walking to class/work? And if these factors are the most important elements than it's more difficult to express this on blogs, but easier to sort of fake an idenity, which, if my friend's are any indication of isn't that difficult to do.

I think it all ties back again to the limitless nature of blogs. Seeing as there are so many possibilities and each person can have several blogs if they'd like, you can choose from any type of identity but as Brett said when your identity doesn't seem authentic, that's when it's "silly." Most of the people in class have 2 blogs-one for class and one for "personal" because we all have different aspects of our lives that we'd like to share with different audiences, but in the end, the blogosphere is omniscien. That was my gripe about the blog created by Cosmo magazine and XiaXia, our favorite asian princess. While it was amusing, the fact that we had to second guess it's authenticity made us more connected to blogs that we had no doubt were real.

P.S. I was listening to Eric's autoblog as I posted. It was comforting and yet creepy at the same time.