Facebook Email Follow-up

My post about how Facebook altered my displayed email address to one routed to their servers has garnered a certain amount of attention. I just did an interview with NPR for “All Things Considered”, which I think will be broadcast today.

In the interview, I said that one question this raises is “who controls my online presentation of myself – me or Facebook?”

I was led down this line of thinking because I’d recently read an article by one of the pastors of my church, Tim Chester. He has been blogging about Facebook and about the relationship between our online presentations of ourselves and our true identity. Article 2 in the series is particularly relevant:

Celebrity culture pores over the minutiae of the lives of the rich and famous. Facebook, blogs and Twitter allow us all to be celebrities with our lives on show. It blurs the public and the private. The world becomes my audience. On Facebook you do not have a conversation, you have an audience. Your life takes place on a stage and you are your own playwright, creating or recreating yourself through your words.

If this piques your interest, here are links to the entire series, titled “Will You Be My Facebook Friend?”:

Some of the points Tim makes are other reasons (than privacy) that I am not a heavy user of social media.