Have Twitter and Facebook Turned Us into a Bunch of Liars?


At a concert, you "tweet" how great the music is, and what a fantastic time you're having. But the truth is that the sound system is garbled, the crowd is rowdy. And you really just want to get back to your car as quickly as possible. This doesn't necessarily mean that you didn't enjoy the show as a whole. But the image that you have drawn in people's minds via your constant "Twittering" is much different: you're living it up, having the time of your life. The rest of the world should be jealous.

If you are reading this, there is a 90% chance that you have a Facebook or Twitter account. And on your Facebook or Twitter account, you have probably sent updates about your breakfast, your workday, your thorny breakup, horrible rush-hour traffic - or even your latest nail color.

Twitter and Facebook make it extremely easy to update the world on the minutiae of what's going on in our lives. We have seen Facebook used for "evil": women use the social networking tool to bust their deadbeat baby-daddies; plenty of people have had their explicit romantic rendezvous uncovered. Some people are even jail bound because of the things that they have posted online.

But for the most part, if you look at the collection of photo albums, wall posts, and the multiple status updates - it's easy to wonder whether or not these people are really telling the truth. Is the person who has been ranting and raving online really as angry as he/she appears to be? And what about the woman who has so deftly planted the most flattering photographs of her solo vacation? If you really think about it, it's not much different from the kind of tomfoolery that people employ on typical dating websites.

You always want to be at your best; you want the person of the opposite sex to view you as a viable romantic option. This is normal. But how far are we willing to go to portray a certain image to the world that is colored slightly differently from what's truly going on in our lives?

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