Journal #11

This week, a friend of mine had an interesting experience when he befriended a local girl on Facebook, chatted with her for several days, and then finally went to meet her in person. According to him, when he actually met the girl, she was strikingly different from her online persona, both in terms of personality and appearance. Of course, this phenomenon isn't limited to Facebook, as anyone you meet online may turn out to be totally different in person--even if you think you already know him or her well from phone conversations and photographs.

My friend's experience reminds me of the summer before this school year, when I started joining Allen Hall groups and befriending people whom I intended to meet once I arrived on campus. Then when I finally got here, I was shocked at how different everyone was! For example, one girl I'd pictured as quiet and serious turned out to be loud and outgoing when I first had lunch with her. Another girl I almost didn't recognize when I saw her in person because I hadn't studied her Facebook photos closely enough to realize she was extremely tall. In the case of my roommate, I remember having made a slight judgment on her personality based on the lack of capital letters on her info section, but when I finally met her in person, I realized that didn't have anything to say about her personality at all.

The discrepancy between what you expect from someone's Facebook profile and how you find that person to be in real life can be due to at least two factors. First, people can actually present themselves online differently than they present themselves in real life, either unknowingly or by a deliberate choice to do so. In addition, your own personal biases can cause you to interpret people's online Facebook profiles in different, often incorrect, ways. For example, I can see why the outgoing personality and the tallness of the two girls mentioned above would surprise me: I probably projected aspects of myself onto them, thus assuming them to be shorter and quieter than they actually were. Projection occurs easily online, I've noticed. In the case of my roommate, I initially misjudged her personality based on my own negative stereotype of people who rarely use capital letters. However, other people without my bias would probably not have made the same judgment that I did.

Anyway, the big lesson I've learned from all these experiences is that you should never rush to judge a person's personality based on a Facebook profile online. Most of the time, I think, people will surprise you in a lot of ways.