Hello, my name is ___.

As soon as you read that statement I’m sure you filled in the blank with your name or maybe something that you identify yourself with. For instance, I would say, “Hello, my name is Jolie Scalf. I love my cat and Tennessee football”. If you would take one look at my Instagram, you would know these things in point five seconds. Many could look at my Spotify playlist and see my love for 2000s Usher or One Direction. You can learn a lot about someone from a social media profile, but how much can you really learn?

Being millennials, we have focused most of our life around the internet and we have learned how to we can portray ourselves anyway we set our Instagram. Though we have found beauty and opportunity through the internet, we somewhere have lost much of the face-to-face interaction that would be present without. We spend hours trying to think of that witty caption to go with the perfectly edited picture and wait for the likes to come rolling in. We have grown up in a world where expressing yourself is shown through a wordy Facebook post. However, we never truly get to know the 2,000 Facebook friends that we have accumulated over the past years.

The internet and social media are a great way of networking and building relationships with other people, however, everyone has a cyber self and a living breathing self. The cyber self is the “hello my name is Jolie Scalf with a cat” and my other self reaches deeper than the physical appearance. It’s the little things that make a person so special and genuine. I love when I hear someone’s story and get to feel the emotion that goes along with it. However, emotion gets lost behind the keyboard. If we lost the keyboard and screens, imagine how much you could learn about diversity and beauty through people.

But if there were no Facebook, how would we ever know Johnny and Susie were in a relationship, but six comments later broke up, or even be reading this article?

Guess we have to weigh the pros and cons on this ongoing battle between communication within society.