#imtherealest

You all are a bunch of fake ass, phony, fraudulent, charlatans! Take your pick of these redundant monickers you unknowingly bestow upon yourselves. The new thing today is to go out, especially onto social media sites, and tell others how real you are or profess some infinitely profound wisdom about your realness; and the superficial antics or fakeness of others. Discussing this topic doesn't quite interest me enough, the way it is heading, because then we get into the internet thugs and bullies; and that is just a demonstration of people's "ignance" which I can easily ignore.

Less ignorable for me however, is the sheer unwillingness that people, youthful ones at that, are deathly afraid of letting others know who they are. I have this Media Literacy class, and the professor authorized anybody to play some music or media at the start of class. Given this opportunity there has only been myself and three other students who have taken advantage of this; even with my coaxing and trying to let others take the opportunity to share with us, there have been no takers. It's the end of three weeks with us being together, yet there is still this intimidation of playing music as if we will find out something about them that is too personal, based solely on their musical interests. I understand the sense of privacy most of us have, my personal preference is to not let anybody know anything about me, at least not right away. Some trust and familiarity has to be established first, which is damn near impossible when the majority of them are afraid to even speak in class. Privacy or stranger danger has been engrained in a lot of us since youth e.g., don't talk to the man in the trench coat standing by the van with tinted windows who is offering you candy or to pet his dog.

This medium we call the internet, is kind of like that candy offering trench coat man. We don't know much about it or where it is going to take us, but we give up some of the most private things about us to this trench coat man. We tell him our names, date of birth, our likes and dislikes, social security and credit card numbers, who we are affiliated with, even the exact location of where we're at and what we're doing.

Some don't think of it as giving away your information to this dog walking candy man. After all, we have things like personal privacy settings, Securecode and Verisign which protect all this information that we put out there, and we're given the guise that nobody will know if we don't want them to...right? Whatever, that's what this one guy at this one place once told me, or I heard or read it somewhere, so it's got to be true. These people I was talking about, like to invent these avatars, or the "perfect me", or the "my sense of self is so obtusely skewed, here's the version of me everybody can see". Upon fabricating these tailor made metaphysical selves they, or you, or all of us, display them on the mybooks, spacefaces, and twiddlrs; only showing the world, to include the people we have actual face to face contact with, the things we think they will like about us and nothing we don't want them to know...hopefully.