Facebook is so much more than a tool for communicating with friends. It’s inevitably also used to project an image of ourselves to best friends, childhood acquaintances, exes and of course the people we’re so want to impress. Online personalities are one-sided, highly edited and, for me, they can be symptomatic of a worrying trend where people get so lost in themselves and their own image that Facebook is merely a tool to create a self-concept they wish to be true.

The same goes for personal blogs where selective photos, galleries of sun-drenched days and the power of Photoshop rule. Take a look at the most visited blogs on Bloglovin and you can see that they’re invariably the ones with endless soft-focus pictures of themselves and a round-up of only the most glamorous places they’ve recently visited. It goes hand in hand with how people choose to maintain their Facebook profiles – I have even seen one person who uploads photos from a fashion blog and then pretends that it’s her…

Facebook should be about interaction and keeping friends and family up to date with your life, not just about posting vacuous facts about yourself and photos of yourself alone in your room!

For most people, social media is a forum to advertise a specific construct of yourself, one that, for the most part, you can control. I’d love to see more people being just as comfortable outlining their fears and (possibly) controversial opinions as they are uploading photos of themselves in a new outfit. I’d love to see more people use Facebook as a tool to share information rather than just as a tool to appease your self-absorbed tendencies.

Self-expression and the power to construct an online personality for ourselves is just one of the many perks of the internet. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be fun, light-hearted and make us feel good! It’s just worrying that people are starting to forget that the sum of who you are is so much more than the photos you upload and what you decide to ‘like’ on Facebook.

I know people who have felt the need to upload intimate photos of their child’s birth, and these days it’s almost odd if someone doesn’t update their status at their own wedding. We get so bogged down with recording our lives that the danger is we forget to properly live them. Travellers search just as avidly for wi-fi as they do adventures and a cold beer! People spend more time uploading photos from their phone than using them to actually phone their friends.

The danger is that Facebook acts like a security blanket, as it’s a scarily easy way of assessing how your life is faring compared to your peers, or at least measuring up to their perceived lifestyle. It looks like more and more people are all set to spend their whole lives frantically refreshing their Facebook news feed, completely missing the real events are going on in the real world!