boyd (2012) kicks off the discussion about identity and self-presentation with the idea that it’s no longer about being “on” or “off”; an individual may not always be on the Internet but increasingly, he or she is always connected to the network. This reminded me of our class discussions about how younger generations no longer think of using the Internet as going online because, really, they are always online. boyd mentions that “being always-on” works best when the people around you are always-on, and this makes sense, given the constant “need for connectedness” that younger generations seem to have. I appreciate her view that being always-on is not an addiction, but that technology offers humans new possibilities to understand and interact. Unfortunately, I feel that this desire to understand and interact is rooted in malice, in that many people are interested in connecting with others (a) to brag about themselves and/or (b) to compare themselves to and gossip about others. In my opinion, this is one of the daunting aspects of the publicness of exposing oneself online, and a good reason to manage one’s online identity accordingly.

Furthermore, it is increasingly apparent that professional and personal identities blur in electronically mediated environments (Andrejevic 2004; Luders 2008; Papacharissi 2009). As such, Papacharissi (2009) suggests that social networking sites represent a confluence of identity roles, spaces where users must adjust their behavior so as to make it appropriate for a variety of different situations and audiences. In other words, while social networking sites are meant to be a place to express oneself, users are starting to realize that there must be some restrictions on this expression, and that it is important to actively manage one’s personal brand or identity online. This was apparent in Gilpin’s (2010) findings that positive opinions are prevalent in professionals’ Twitter activity, which suggests that negative opinions are expressed offline or on a more “traditional new media” such as blogs.

Now, for college students, this does not seem to be the case. New media allow people to present various forms of themselves to others at a distance (Mendelson and Papacharissi 2010), which might be one reason why college students find social networking sites to be so attractive. Furthermore, young people have a wider range of opportunities for photographic self-representation due to the availability of cheap cameras (Tinkler 2008). While it is true that social norms impose limitations of what is acceptable to post on social networking sites, college students’ desires to share and present themselves seem to push those boundaries to the limits at times, as shown by the lack of effort to hide underage drinking and the racy comments that often accompany the photos. What never ceases to amaze me is that college students’ overabundance of photos usually capture the same types of activities over and over again, yet their desire to share the photos never seems to dwindle. As noted by the Mendelson and Papacharissi (2010), it would be interesting to follow a group of students as they photographically move through their college years and beyond, to see which photos are untagged or how their photo posting and commenting behavior changes. But as we’ve discussed all semester, once anything is on the Internet, it never really goes away…so in many cases, the damage is already done.