Before, if you wanted to make a record of your deepest most personal thoughts, hopes, and fears, you might have bought a diary and started page one in this way: "Dear Diary." And then you would have taken that diary and clicked it shut with a little lock and put it inside a box. Finally, you'd cover it with six sweaters and perhaps some old gym socks and hide it in a location exactly where your 'rents or your small brother or Freddy Krueger could not possibly find it and read it.
Today, though, you just might do this instead: Turn on your computer and use the Internet to go to a Web website known to millions of other individuals. There you'd produce (for free) a page of your very personal and tell the world your name, your age, your address, your telephone quantity, and how to reach you by e-mail.
And then you might decorate your personal page with details about your wishes and hopes and fears: what you're looking for in a boyfriend or perhaps a girlfriend, the things that make you happy or sad, and also the most intimate 411 about yourself and your friends. Oh, and also you would probably add a few photos.
If this were a perfect world, the concept of Facebook or MySpace or any of dozens of other social network Web sites could be pretty cool and quite harmless. They would offer a opportunity for you personally to come out of your shell as a young adult and explain yourself to your friends and perhaps even add a couple of more individuals to your circle. When it comes time for you personally to apply to a college or for a job, you will be doing fairly much the same sort of thing: putting yourself and your experiences in a neat package and presenting it to someone else to evaluate, hoping they'll choose you.
In a less formal way, you do something like this whenever you meet someone in a social scenario: You select the clothing and arrange your hair and do whatever else you do to show the image you would like to present. And then you polish your lines so that the people you meet wish to include you in their world.
This is not a perfect world. The reality is that your school, your neighborhood, your town - the world - isn't usually an honest and fair place. We are surrounded by posers, people who put forth a "package" that is not always true.
In the simplest and least threatening situation, these posers are no more harmful than anyone else who seeks to boost himself or herself above what they really are. You already know these kinds of people: the guy who claims to have a Porsche but keeps showing up at parties on a bicycle, or the girl who claims to be this close to half a dozen TV hearththrobs.
And then, regrettably, there are real threats. Imagine that on MySpace you become friends having a cute 18-year-old guy whose page says he is headed off to Syracuse University on a combined lacrosse and creative writing scholarship and plays lead guitar in a hot country western/hip hop fusion band. Sounds very promising.
Except, how do you realize "JoJo" isn't really a 45-year-old unemployed school cafeteria janitor having a criminal record who lives in his parents' basement? The answer is: You do not, unless you step outside with the virtual world of the Internet and make actual get in touch with. And before you do step outside, be certain that you realize how to protect yourself in the real world.
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