This thought crossed my mind from time to time when I was glancing through the friends' updates, but I never bothered to find time and right words to put it down on pixels paper.
Facebook makes you defenselessly public. All the pictures, personal info, statuses and places updates you put in - crack open your mind to whoever sees it - scanning through your profile reveals your priorities, fears, weaknesses by how you want yourself to be perceived. That's nothing new.
But. Another way you reveal even more about yourself is your reaction to the way others want you to perceive them. Your pattern of thinking shows much better in the way you comment on others' pictures posted and updates than if those were carefully picked by you. "LIKE" is a great shortcut to find out who is either in line with certain values, or supports somebody with those values or is playing neutral on expressing their opinion.
And so, it is with mixed feelings that I note to myself that a person I thought of as smart and interesting, can actually "like" his friendless's girls' night out drunk pictures, updates on 0.7 pound weight loss by another friendess, an ongoing romantic correspondence between a friend and his fiancee, and a status updates by rhetoric questions obviously determined to emphasize the friendess's high moral and feminist values as well as self-perceived high IQ.
Online social networks are simply online social networks. But they can save a great deal of time in evaluating a person with just a few quick Litmus tests. That is, if you do pay attention to shallow and superficial friends' activity - your are either not such a profound person I thought you were, or - you care enough about your shallow and superficial friends to know you support them.
Priceless if you are unsure about how close to keep a certain person; although does not work on those who have a deep and sophisticated plan behind every comment and "like" :)
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