Protecting & Reinventing Our Identities...

While media and marketing have learned to influence our identities with personalization in advertising, we have also become more aware of ourselves and our own identities. Marketers can reach out to us with personalized messages, but we have more control over what we accept and what we reject. As Clive Thompson discusses in "Web ushers in age of ambient intimacy," Internet tools such as Facebook and Twitter have given us new levels of control in our lives. We can easily portray ourselves to our friends and acquaintances exactly as the person we want to be. This new realization comes with its setbacks. There will always be someone who knows who you really are and calls you out on your fraudulent attempts to be "cool." This is where protecting our identities comes in. In a way, we must protect our identities from people we know, while also protecting them from marketers who might portray us in a false light. It's a little more complicated than having someone steal your credit card. I think that for many of us, this task has become all-consuming. We are constantly thinking about what our next Facebook status will be; who might have looked at our profile before we took those pictures down; why that person invited us to that weird group. At the same time, as Thompson mentions, we have begun to learn more about ourselves through things like Facebook statuses and Twitter posts. Through all the superficiality, we might begin to uncover what is really important to us.