A Bipolar Facebook

My Facebook persona is really two persons in one. I have used my facebook page to promote my work as a multimedia journalists and to stay in touch with friends and family.

My professional facebook page.

I think the amount of friends I have one facebook does reflect on my persona. While I do not personally know 1,332 people by name, I think the fact that I have had some sort of contact with these people reflects the kind of person I am - outgoing an willing to talk to complete strangers. This also can be applied to photos that I am tagged in. I have taken down pictures in the past that have reflected poorly on my online persona. While I do not drink often, I do go to house parties where there are large amounts of alcohol, and photos of me in that setting could be detrimental to the persona I am trying to keep online.

The ESPN facebook page.

There are some aspects of my life that I choose to leave out entirely on Facebook. These include: relationship status, religious affiliation, political affiliation, sexual preference and the year of my birthday. I do this for more professional reason than personal reasons, but if you really want to know these things, just have a conversation with me and stop stalking my Facebook page. Items like these can be detrimental to someone if they are friends with coworkers, bosses or potential employers on Facebook that could disagree with your political views or religious affiliation. While this is illegal, it is still commonly practiced in the professional world.

Even my personal facebook page includes photos of me working and promotes my freelance multimedia work.

My Facebook is drastically different than the family photo album, home videos or journal. Because anyone can post to my page and add to my persona, there are aspects of my life, photos or information, that I would have forgotten to add to a journal or never said in a home video. The pictures on my Facebook page are not all posed Christmas-family photos. There are candid shots of me working taken by other photographers that are some of my favorite photos, because I did not know they were being taken.
I value my online persona greatly, and because I'm in the communications industry, I know the importance of keeping a clean online persona.