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We Live Now

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Throughout her essay “The Way We Live Now: I Tweet, Therefore I am,” Peggy Orenstein attempts to demonstrate her personal experience with Twitter as a means of indicating the distinction technology can create between a person and their persona and how that can affect their overall social interactions. Indeed technology does have a profound impact on the performance culture in human interaction, and Peggy’s perception isn’t too far off from assessing this repositioning of events.
Furthermore, the alter-egos that we create on our ventures through technological social platforming often lead our fellow companions onto a different version of our self regardless of whether or not its authentic information. Nowadays, the means to externalize our …show more content…
For instance, “one academic study, published last year by the National Academy of Sciences, showed that a computer model built using someone’s Facebook likes can judge the person’s personality traits more accurately than can friends or even family members” (Maney). So if one person seems to portray an almost angelic and cheery side of themselves in front of you every time, yet they input likes on dark, dark cases like war and brutality and the like, then are they really that cheery person you seem to know? “When every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy” (Orenstein 348)? Those questions are in essence, like answers to the problem of adverse effects technology can have on our day-to-day interactions. For example, I can spend the whole hour writing and commenting back and forth with a friend on social media about a greasy pancake, yet that same pancake I can only offer a few words about when talking about it in person. When it comes to technology, “the creation and release of our doppelgängers could be trouble, used to influence or control us in ways we currently can’t comprehend” (Maney). For example, if a girlfriend sees her boyfriend talking on Skype with another lady, that guy is going to get it big! Without such platforms,

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