"Ultimately, though, the success of sites like MySpace and Facebook may have less to do with the opportunities they provide for self-expression than with peer pressure. Once Facebook is available, many students feel compelled to join simply because everybody else is using it. “I tried to hold out and go against the flow,” Cal Nannes, a junior at Davidson College, in North Carolina, said. “But so many of my friends were members that I finally gave in.” Many Facebook users also admit that they tailor their profiles to win the approval of their peers. “I want to seem self-aware, but not a pretentious asshole,” Matt Morello, a Yale graduate who logs on to Facebook about a dozen times a day, wrote in an e-mail. He described how simply listing his favorite music became an agonizing task: “I never used to update this, thinking it was just too fraught a category (like Favorite Books still is, unless there’s some joke to make). I’m a musician: what I play and listen to has always been an important part of my identity, and it’s only fairly recently that I’ve developed the confidence to say, you know, I like this, and I don’t really care if you don’t. So what’s there now?"
A passage from John Cassidy's "Me Media", an account of the origins and development of Facebook, combined with some reflections--like this--on what it all means. Peer pressure to join, and to join one needs to create a representation of oneself.
Nicholas Carr, also writes about this anxiety of creating this online existence "avatar anxiety"
Your online self ... is entirely self-created, and because it determines your identity and social standing in an internet community, each decision you make about how you portray yourself - about which facts (or falsehoods) to reveal, which photos to upload, which people "to friend," which bands or movies or books to list as favorites, which words to put in a blog - is fraught, subtly or not, with a kind of existential danger. And you are entirely responsible for the consequences as you navigate that danger. You are, after all, your avatar's parents; there's no one else to blame. So leaving the real world to participate in an online community - or a virtual world like Second Life - doesn't relieve the anxiety of self-consciousness; it magnifies it. You become more, not less, exposed.(Nicholas Carr -- The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock's avatar)
