Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Online Self Image Distortion

                When I first looked over the self reflection on page fifty seven of the text I immediately thought to myself, “Distorted myself online, I ain’t no pervert, why would I do that.” After this momentary lapse of brain function I quickly realized that everyone has distorted their image somehow online and I was no exception to the norm.  Although I could not recall it at first, I remembered a specific instance recently that I had distorted my image. My facebook profile picture at the time of the distortion was a picture from high school when I was sporting around 5’10’’ 205 lbs. For my birthday my fiancé got me tickets to a Colts game and we both went down and enjoyed a very nice night in which we took a few pictures. The only problem with the pictures we took that night was that I was no longer sporting my high school slim; I was weighing in at about 240 lbs. My freshman and sophomore year had not been kind to me and I was not about to let myself broadcast that to the online community. Had I had not put on so much weight I would have most definitely put the picture as my profile picture because it was current and I was with my fiancé and I was at a colts game for crying out loud.
            As far as ethical consequences to my online distortion, I do not feel that it had any ethical problems it was simply a decision I made based on my self- image at the time. I do not believe that it was unethical by any means. I was trying to make sure that no would notice the amount of weight that I had gained. However there are some consequences to my decision of not updating my picture because people that do not see me in the real world only have my online image to go off of. It also affects my relationship a bit because I am reluctant to put pictures up of my fiancé and I because in the past I had been self conscious about how much freshman pounds I had gained. I think that my insecurities arose from the cultural norm that is accepted much like the one that is talked about in the textbook. Self image is distorted because of the culture and what is acceptable to look like and I bought into it completely with my facebook picture distortion.

                                                   

1 comment:

  1. Ahh... they're both nice pictures! Freshman year was rough for me too! So was grad school. haha

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