NYT: Growing Up On Facebook

I'm very interested in the process and journey of personal development, particularly the challenge of leaving behind old behaviors, mental maps, and self-definitions. I'm also interested in how that process plays out in interpersonal relationships, having observed how difficult it can be for other people to see you as the person you've become as opposed to the person you've always been (for them).

Peggy Orenstein's article in today's New York Times, Growing Up On Facebook, touches on these issues and how they may play out at a time when we increasingly share the details (minutiae?) of our lives on facebook, twitter, blogs (!), etc..

Orenstein writes:

college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?.....

Certainly, I kept in touch with a few true old friends, but no one else — thank goodness! — witnessed the many and spectacular metaphoric pratfalls I took on the way to figuring out what and whom I wanted to be. Even now, time bends when I open Facebook: it’s as if I’m simultaneously a journalist/wife/mother in Berkeley and the goofy girl I left behind in Minneapolis. Could I have become the former if I had remained perpetually tethered to the latter?.....

Thought-provoking stuff.

On a related note, I recommend you check out my friend Eileen's new blog - it's terrific. You can find it here: Nurves-Circuit Therapy with Eileen J. Dordek, LCSW; Snippets of Psychotherapy for Everyday Life


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