Beginning of the end

I'm going to be wrapping this project up tomorrow probably, delete my alter-ego account and go back to my regular Facebook use. More than anything else, this project has just confused me. I think if I had better organized it, it might have made more sense and I could draw clearer conclusions, but as it is I'm struggling to figure out if I actually learned anything. Because for the most part, my crazy persona has gone unnoticed-- only good friends have caught on. I think most people on Facebook who are my "friends" don't even know me well enough to notice a complete personality reversal, which I suppose is rather telling. I think if I edited my friends down to only the people I actually consider friends in life and not on the internet, I'd have much much fewer. The nature of relationships on the internet is so simplified-- everything has a category "friend" "relative" even "it's complicated." Things lose their complexity because no one wants to take the time to write or read the full situation of any relationship. On Facebook, my best friend in the entire world and a girl I haven't spoken to since elementary school both become just my "friends." And even if you look at interactions between people, a full story is never told because everyone knows that it's in public view, so they censor and edit. Reality online is an interesting study in dichotomies-- while it allows for characters and personalities and relationships that could never exist in real life, they need to fit in certain boxes-- it's become much less free-form. You can't write in all your favorite books and whatnot anymore on Facebook; you need to choose them from a list. So I think at the same time that Facebook is allowing different personalities to flourish, it is simultaneously killing individuality. Interesting, no?