how " real" are you online?

I'm also trying to be open and as real as possible, but it's hard when I've been faking it to please others my whole life. I'm more real online because I feel I don't have to prove anything here. Also I think people here are being real. It's kind of an expectation and it's part of what I'm finding good about being here. I can practice relating genuinely and accepting myself as I am, with the aim of NOT putting a self-defining spin on things.

I'm just me online, for good or bad.

I think when I'm online, it is totally different in real life. I talk unstopped than normal

I share my personality without restriction online. However I have trolled people before on games. Other times on games where most of the playerbase is men I make no effort to disclose I am a girl so they just go on thinking I am a man when I'm grouped up and chatting in game. I almost never use discord.

Personality and personal information are different. I don't share any information that is too personal but I don't talk to any one person for prolonged amounts of time online. As in I don't aim to form online relationships.

Online I tend to be more open personality wise, but I think more of that as my real self without the slight social anxiety I have. In real life it takes me a long time to become fully comfortable with people I meet.

As for what I share. I give out enough information about myself that someone who knows me would recognise me but that doesn't bother me. I have posted pictures of myself and shared my location with people. I have also opened up to people and connected via facebook with people I have known for years here.

I don't give my name online, except for my FB page, which has no personal info. No age, birthday, location, job, nothing. BUT...the only people I am friends with are people who know me IRL. So..I don't have to post anything because they already know.

I don't give specific details like where I live or my actual birth date. But general local and age is fine. I have FB but don't post much.

I share certain parts of my personality but not all of it. I mai lay share my problems and certain aspects of my life on here.

I think it depends who I am talking to. But in reality, you never know who is on the other end. I tend to not use my current zip code. Or give last name/company I work for. But with things about me, who I am and things I like, deal with, etc I am open about.

My first post:

I understand that many folks on the internet construct different personas in different places and that none of these ‘personalities’ are real.

I am too stupid to try that - I have problems keeping track of myself.

I’m myself. Being myself is often detrimental as I am not a nice person. I would reveal my location to others but not, I think, my name.

Interesting question.

Only half. As far as the world is concerned, I came on the scene in 2013 out of thin air.

No personal info. Just the best comments and advice I can think of at the time. If I don't feel I have anything relevant to say or add, I do my best not too post.

With ⅔’s of America’s millennials posting naked selfies online, I think that it is time for a federal law requiring every citizen to do the same and to provide their full name, address, phone number(s), sexual orientation/identification, relationship status, and CV’s (including university semesters GPA’s). Any aliases used on listed websites must also be disclosed.

All of this information will be stored on a Dept of Homeland Security server.

This would force everyone to keep it real or be outed.

Pfff. They already have that in Utah in their $12 billion dollar NSA facility that has it's own powerplant, and it's own cooling lake, and it's own city, all to spy illegally on US citizens in contravention of the FISA act. lol Big Brother is here.

My primary complaint about the facility was it’s location - who the fekk wants Salt Lake City as the primary cultural attraction? Now nestling in VA was swell and good and D.C. is a toddling town with fresh blue-crab-jimmies from the Not-so-distant ‘burbs.

But SLC? Dinner shows of Oklahoma reign supreme. The Fuller Brush Man visits monthly so you can keep your Florsheims spit-polished and the Texaco Man (whom you can trust, as he wears a Star) keeps your Hudson humming and road-ready. USO every Thursday night and Saturday Bond Drives for our Continuing War Effort against Communism and Short Skirts.

I do not. I do not. I do not doubt for one minute that the facility continues to keep tabs on American Citizens (although the NSA semi-denies that it is still doing so - it’s all Classified, ya know).

I worry about a Mormon coup. I believe that the Elders of the Morman church are in cahoots with the Mormon-majority of NSA employees at the Bluffdale facility and that they have a plan to shut down D.C. and to move the Capitol to SLC. It could happen this weekend, but they may wait until Romney is in the Senate so that he can declare a kind of ‘official’ regency over the Trump administration.

Which brings up one other point: rodents can ‘pass’ cognitive tests and I had no doubt that our C-in-C could pass same. But, please, do we simply believe that he would lose interest if given something such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory?

Sheesh.

Let me tell you the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths. The former cannot help but display their aberrant behaviors to others. We psychopaths are so good at masking our aberrant behaviors that you would never believe us capable of those things that you could never believe us capable of doing. Does anyone doubt that? Honestly? No politics here (I’ve promised never to speak of politics here... or Constitutional Law (seriously; Constitutional Law is really boring, for the most part)) just a reaction to the Things We Dare Not Speak.

I have not checked the news lately. The Mormon coup might have already occurred. Or Congress may have passed another Temporary Budget Bill that prohibits chihuahuas from being arrested and re-patriated to the State of Chihuahua in Mexico.

I don’t expect much from government any longer. I think that it started in June of 1968. I have had a Brain Fever since that time. Time. One-half century of memories. Time to die. Time. To die. Let it be quick and not some long-drawn-out Elizabethan death-play.

I am not a skilled selfie photographer. I am a camera-child, a child of film, Kodachrome 25, D-76 and stop bath. Broncolor strobes, Sinar and Hasselblad. Nikon and Canon. I navigated darkrooms by smell.

I’m guessing that I owe, at least, nine selfies to the NSA. All of my real body, bones and skin and scars.

How real am I online? Jesus. I don’t have any reason to hide anything. I am as crazy as you can accept; I am as crazy as I ought to be.

I've only tried this forum, a Game of Thrones forum, Pinterest, and Facebook as places to meet people or gather ideas. I really screwed up on that GOT one in some way because I still believe that they were bullying me to go away. I told some lies about myself as little ways that were jokes between me and my friends because my friends were on there with me. They thought it was funny they told me but the people that were older there must not have.

I'm totally real on this forum though. Never told a lie.

Kodachrome you give us those nice, bright colors, bring us the greens of summer, make us think all the world's a sunny day, oh, my!

My online persona is who I am, now, after life has worn away the edges. It's who I want to be in the eyes of others, someone with value who is more than the sum of his parts, the product of his past, the quotient of his halves...the person in real life is a very lonely, very low, and an utterly despised shadow of himself. That person hides behind a carefully-wrought veil of dissimulation, half-truths, and subtle misdirection through verbal cues.

Here, online, the inner child gets to come out and whatever tattered scrap of light that remains within can burst forth in all of its compassionate and kindly glory. Here, online, I no longer need to wear the heavy plates of sin-blackened steel, I do not have to isolate, and I believe I am closer to the truer sense of sober and responsible freedom.

Does this need to hide on some level behind the anonymity of the internet just to function at the most basic level of existence so as not to be completely cut off from all human contact indicate some form of necessary psychopathy, then?

And yet...does this not also increase the collective sense of loneliness? I cannot touch or be touched through a computer screen save through the power of the words I craft in strings like a hedge wizard crafts magic formulæ, and that physical touch, or lack thereof, renders everything in shades of gray instead of color because I cannot be comforted by the light of the monitor, except in the most temporal, shallow way possible.

To deny any portion's existence, therefore, is to not truly be known, and it is only when we are truly known by another human being, that the magical alchemy of compassion and spiritual healing can begin because we measure our worth, for better or worse, through the eyes of others.

Eyes are windows to the soul, and when we look into the eyes of another, we're not seeing their soul, but a reflection of our own, and that is why we seek mercy. The eyes that mirror ours and reveal to us our own soul can reflect back either warmly or coldly, healing or destroying with a glance. Such an act cannot be done through the medium of the interwebz, and that is why, no matter how much I connect to others by the light of my computer screen, it nevertheless leaves me lonelier than ever, and more keenly aware of my exile.

It's a far gone lullaby, sung many years ago/
Mama, mama many worlds I've come since i first left home...

It ain't me , it ain't me ..I'm no senators son .

'Fortunate Son' wasn't really inspired by any one event. Julie Nixon was dating David Eisenhower. You'd hear about the son of this senator or that congressman who was given a deferment from the military or a choice position in the military. They seemed priviledged and whether they liked it or not, these people were symbolic in the sense that they weren't being touched by what their parents were doing. They weren't being affected like the rest of us.[16]

Within reason my persona is rather true to who I am. I'm probably more chatty online than I get opportunity to be offline.

I feel I can be myself here, in a safer realm than I could elsewhere (because of Major Depressive disorder, plus GAD with a pretty bad social anxiety). That's just about the only way to get real help, and to make lasting friends.

But as far as sharing personal data, info? No way. There are far too many predatory types in the world. (I only share things like that when I feel I know people well, and know it's really safe.)

True dat. I feel the same. The online medium allows me to express who I really am without the armor we must wear in public.