Social Media Image

Fri 17 February 2012 12:33, Lizette van der Laan

Is it the real you, the witty you, the person who reads the most interesting articles, makes the adventurous trips and always has great pictures of him or herself? I think we tend to edit our lives on social media to fit the image of the offline world, where everybody seems happy and pretty thanks to editing, directing and in some cases a large dose of photoshop. But who sees what’s really going on?

For some women that was the reason to participate in the real real-life soap Connected (Ned.3). Five women documented their lives for a few months. The rules? There is no décor, no director and the women are not allowed to watch the tapes back and delete parts they don’t like. What you see is women like they are. When they just woke up, have a bad hair day, have arguments, feel depressed or lonely and when they have no clue what their lives are about.

Why would you film yourself like this? For some of the women it was because they were sick of everybody pretending something they’re not on social media. Great for TV, but would we ever go back on Twitter if everyone would be totally honest about himself? Isn’t life just a little bit better with only the better us on social media?

What would happen if companies started to be more real on their accounts? Some companies should even change there punch line on their profiles from ‘We like to help you.’ into ‘We pretend we want to help you, but honestly we won’t, we just want your money and therefore we make our systems so complicated that you’ll just give up because it is too frustrating to work with us.’And what would the NS state during heavy snowfall? ‘Just get your free coffee and leave us alone, we also have no clue what we are doing.’It would make some things a lot easier if companies said the truth. But just like us, why would we say all on social media?

We should be glad companies are often more social online than they are offline and we don’t have to deal with things like this; ‘There are 43 tweets before you, please wait. In the meanwhile you can check out Connected to entertain yourself.’

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