When "pretending" goes too far...

I couldn't even tell you the last time I pretended to be a famous actor, character, singer, etc., besides when being forced by a child during babysitting. I've finally made it around to contributing to the blog, however this has been on my mind since the first week, using social media to pretend. However, what I am going to talk about is the complete extreme.

I came across this a couple years ago from a girl I grew up with and knew pretty well. One day I went to her profile and saw "___ ____ is now friends with Edward Cullen" and several other actors and actresses. I was like "no way!" Why would someone so famous add someone so.... not famous. Well, I noticed that by the next day/week there were several friends of hers named Edward Cullen or whoever else. I didn't catch on a first, I can honestly say I was even tricked at first but once I visited the profiles, I realized the real actors didn't make the profiles. It was puzzling to me as well as sad to find out that people spend all of their days pretending to be someone they are not. Their whole day is spent adding pictures and posting as someone famous.

I'm glad we learned the term parasocial relationship, because I would have explained the situation to her and how I really KNOW what she was going through. Her facebook relationships continued to get creeper. She then added a ton of people that were in parasocial relationships with actors and actresses. These people acted through fakebook like they really knew so and so. I couldn't believe it still. Or maybe, I didn't want to believe it.

And this is where I get to the scariest part of it all. Her obsession with these "characters" and "friends" actually tore her real relationships apart. She would bring up these people in conversations every day and was convinced these facebook friends were really doing the thing they said they were doing. I am seriously afraid to be that consumed in a social media that my days and nights are spent talking to people I don't even know. One night when she, my best friend and I were hanging out (They were really good friends), she said, "I have to get online right now, Sarah Jane (fake name) is cutting her wrists again, she just told me." We said, "yea, because as she is typing you that message she is bleeding all over her computer.. COME ON!!"

Okay, this blog post has to end somewhere. What I am trying to get at is that this class is COMPLETELY relatable to our lives. I wish I would have had this class sooner, because I think I could have been more help to myself and other people. I think what we talk about in class everyday is that we all want to be healthier social media and technology users.