This can be considered a very easy way to start my research into online personalities. I'm, and I'm sure many others, use the lack of emotional interaction to their advantage - I met my online best friend through the blogging platform Tumblr. Without the internet I'd have never of crossed paths with her. Although arguably our friendship was built upon the lack of real life interaction (it's much easier to express anything about our life without having to physically talk, see each others gestures etc) it made meeting in real life and showing each other our real life worlds easier, as we'd already established a relationship then. Arguably, this shows that social media is a way of coaxing ourselves into a confidence boost.
A lot of people including myself use Social Media as a way of making ourselves seem put together and that we live in "perfect" life; my Instagram feed is carefully selected to show the best photographs I've taken, then edited, to people. I create a colour scheme, use white backgrounds and aesthetically pleasing objects to purposely create an identify for myself - even though I and many other people I know don't live exactly like that. We have much more messy, complicated lives.
The idea that I'd formed from examining my own persona was to create something that would clearly show the differences in online vs offline. I wanted something that could be relatable, and establish how we are marketing ourselves completely differently than what we actually are, whether that be a good thing or bad. My piece would hopefully be illustrative and easy to de-code; showing the differences between the Internet and real world.
This led me to my next research: the way we see our mentality. Because we can sometimes have very down days, but act completely fine online, it's a way of hiding our emotions for fear of judgement, or to escape real life and have a satisfactory perfect life online. The lack of unable to read someone through the internet means it's a lot easier to hide away, or make yourself look like an idealised, happy person, though you may not be. I wanted to explore why people do this (including myself) - for popularity or not.
