Social media (and especially Pinterest)

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Social media allow us to craft our own image and present it to the world, in ways that only a few artists and writers were able to do in the centuries before us. More than that: we can do it over and over again, in various ways. We don’t have to present ourselves on Facebook in the same way that we do on LinkedIn, or Tumblr, or Twitter.

 

 

Take me, for example. My Facebook persona is pretty vanilla. I repost this blog to my Facebook feed, but I suspect very few of my sixty-odd “friends” read it. And, after all, why would they? Facebook Loren is mostly 1970s Pacific Northwest Loren. A large percentage of my Facebook friends are my school acquaintances from Battle Ground, and various Pacific Northwest relatives. As you can imagine, their politics vary considerably from mine, in most (though not all) cases. So: we stick to safe topics, and harmless photos, and nostalgia.

 

 

LinkedIn Loren is very dull: he’s just a brief resume.  He has a reasonable number of connections, but (since he’s not actively looking for a job) he’s not out there roaming the LinkedIn network very much. Mostly I use LinkedIn to find out what my various work acquaintances are doing nowadays. Now and then I’m amused to find that some of them are exaggerating their titles, and their experience, and their education, and their accomplishments. (But I won’t rat them out. Not here, anyway. Give me a call, and I’ll tell you all about it.)

 

 

Twitter Loren is a nonentity. This blog reposts there too, but I seldom look at Twitter; it’s too busy, too full of chatter.

 

 

Blog Loren is the same person on Posterous, Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress, as this goes out to all four. Three of them – Posterous, Blogger, and WordPress – are full of windy pontificators like me, so I’m just a face in the crowd there. I’m not really at home on Tumblr, which is really more about images and memes and being cutting-edge. I like Tumblr, though, more as a subscriber (and occasional reposter) than as a contributor. Few people on Tumblr read me, but I read and look at lots of people on Tumblr, and enjoy them very much.

 

 

Then there is (or was) Pinterest Loren.

 

 

I heard about Pinterest, and decided to try it. I was sort of charmed by it; I liked the mosaic layout of the pages, and the variety, and the ease with which you can browse, and the way you can click through a pinned image to an original website. In no time at all, Pinterest Loren had lots of stuff pinned: funny pictures, and cute puppies and kitties, and cute G-rated men, and pretty landscapes, and . . .

 

 

OMG.

 

 

Pinterest Loren was a sixteen-year-old girl.

 

 

I deactivated Pinterest Loren not long ago. I don’t think he/she will be back anytime soon.

 

 

I think I did the world a favor.

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Internet identities

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I had a acquaintance some years ago who was active on every single social-networking site: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. He was anxious to make a name for himself. More than a name: an image.

 

 

(This is not me, by the way, so get that idea out of your head. It’s not one of those “I have a friend who . . .” things. This is a real story about someone else. You know I always tell the truth about myself. Well, most of the time.)

 

 

My friend's LinkedIn image was professional: he'd had more jobs than you could shake a stick at. He was all over the place in his profession, rising from level to level. You could trace his career growth on a graph, if you wanted to: manager, director, executive director –

 

 

Except that it wasn’t true. I knew that he'd actually lost his previous job and wasn't working at all at the moment. So: he was either making it all up, or misdating the information he was posting. I didn’t want to call him out – who wants to destroy a career? – but I had a strange feeling about all of this, as I watched him go from untruth to untruth on LinkedIn.

 

 

Then there was his Facebook persona.

 

 

On Facebook, he was Mister Philanthropist. He was all over the place: giving speeches here, making heartfelt appeals there. He was amazing. Some of his Facebook friends were buying it: he was getting “Congratulations!” comments right and left on his various philanthropic / altruistic posts.

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(I, on the other hand, knew that he might or might not be making this stuff up. And, even if he wasn't, he was certainly making the LinkedIn stuff up. And, for those of us who were following him on both LinkedIn and Facebook: we had to ask ourselves how he could possibly have the time to do all these things – be a stellar businessman and a stellar philanthropist – at the same time?)

 

 

So what’s a girl to do?

 

 

I could have messaged him, or confronted him. So could lots of other people, I imagine.

 

 

But I didn’t.  Oh, well, I thought.  It’ll blow up eventually. And, when it does, it will be spectacular.

 

 

And we (who knew the truth) will be able to say: “Oh, I had no idea! I thought it all sounded a little out of kilter. But I really didn’t know he was doing all of that . . . “

 

 

A warning to all of you fibbers out there: the truth will come out.

 

 

The Internet is built that way.

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