Real or Fake

Recently, as the internet became an important useful communication tool, it seems people tend to spend more time finding their friends with computers. We can easily find someone who are famous or our friends by putting their name in a search engine. We can use these not only for people who we have met, but also for these whom we have never seen. We try to connect with people who we do not know before as well as we strive to get along with people who are around us in daily life. For example, it is not unusual that we are asked a question like “Do you have Facebook?” by someone whom we met for the first time. However, my thought is there are some differences between a real person and the person on the internet.
First, when we see someone’s Facebook profile, I think the first thing we always do is look at his or her picture. Seeing the pictures could be one of the materials used to judge a person and an important factor to think whether it is possible to get along with him or not. Besides, Emily Nussbaum writes “The biggest issue of living in public, of course, is simply that when people see you, they judge you” (Emily Nussbaum. Say Everything. February 12, 2007. pg 5). This mention supports my opinion in the way that it is easy for everyone to judge a person with some pieces of pictures on the web site. For example, if I saw a profile picture and it was kind of a crazy one, I would think that I cannot be a friend with the person. Judging a person with profile pictures might cause a big misunderstanding, but chances which could be a factor that brings some errors are everywhere on web in the modern world we are living. In addition, we have to consider these pictures are ones which are chosen by the person as favorites. Sometimes it might be funny one and other times a photo with a beautiful scene is selected. Therefore, profile pictures are considered surfaces of a person.
Moreover, there are people who become more talkative or active than their real life. According to my friend’s experience, she met a man who was so funny and kind on an internet site. After chatting online several times, they wanted to meet with each other so they planned to do that. Finally, she met the man but he didn’t talk with her so much. She wondered if the man that she had imagined was not real, but just an aspect of him on web. Like this situation, we can display fake faces to other people. Those could make us confused or sometimes make us even scared. I would like to take a lot of bad news which are involved in the internet for instance. One
of those is a case which a man and a girl got to know each other on a web site and exchanged personal information, unfortunately, he could kidnap her because of her personal information such as her address, name and pictures. Sometimes, disclosing individual information on the internet become life-threatening so we have to pay attention to put our information on the web site to save our life.
Also, Don Tapscott said like that. They have no shame. It is pretty routine these day for girls to post provocative pictures of themselves online,” warns M. Gigi Durham, the thoughtful author of The Lolita Effect. Young people, unaware that it may come back to haunt them, merrily give out all sorts of personal information online, whether it’s to a college recruiter, a future employer, or to a manipulative marketer, cyberbully or predator.(Don, Tapscott. Grown up digital: how the net generation is changing your world. McGraw-Hill Professional, 2009. pg 4). I think no shame does not mean just dishonor, but more serious things as I have discussed.
In conclusion, because of the worldwide growth of the internet, we are increasingly apt to communicate with each other using computer. A lot of information exists online and we can see that anywhere as long as there are computers. However, we cannot assume a face we can see on the internet is believable information because it might be an aspect of a person. In other words, we are able to fake our internet face as much as we want. (732)