Identity and Its Projection Onto the Page

One of the most prolific writers ever, Isaac Asimov, claimed to have written more than 500 books.  Although I take some issue with that figure, as some of the books he claimed authorship for were merely collections for which he served as a contributing commentator or editor, there is no mistaking the fact that he had left plenty of material behind after he died in 1992.  For those who personally knew him, Isaac Asimov was much more than the paper trail he left behind.  But for the rest of us, reading his stories and essays is how we can get to know him, albeit admittedly in a rather imperfect, incomplete way.

That's a positive picture of the duality associated with people's tangible, physical, "real" existence and the projections of themselves that they leave in society's communications networks.  People can also leave negative information as well, such as police records, poor academic records, or adverse news stories.  Now we can add Facebook to that as well, with all sorts of horror stories abounding about how users posted embarrassing pictures that landed them in trouble with their employers or made comments on their page that continue to hound them. No, Facebook is not paper per se: it's worse, easy to virally transmit anywhere and almost instantaneously.

A few months ago, as a protest to impending legislation that seemed to threatened freedom of expression on the Internet, Wikipedia voluntarily shut itself down for 24 hours.  I seriously wonder how the Facebook addicts would react should that site cease its operations for any substantial span of time.  Would some of them, who tend to think of it as an extension of their own selves, undergo an identity crisis and freak out?  In some ways I envy the kids of today and the remarkable innovations in the area of digitization that have made communications so convenient for them.  But suppose I had no Facebook and was a teenager: would some others regard me as an outcast of sorts?  I think I already know the answer to that, and it's a shame.  Our identities are not what we project onto a page, but who we really are in person.  Let's not get the two confused, please...