Dealing with the second self

The article The Digital Identity Divide: How Technology Knowledge Impacts College Students states at the very beginning that females are among the number of groups that are “most underprepared for the digital college environment”. I found this very interesting, although not particularly surprising. I wanted to uncover some more concrete statistics in regards to this topic when I stumbled upon this Ted Talk. Although it doesn’t discuss the exact topic I was searching for, I thought that it introduced me to many concepts regarding the human relationship with technology that I had not encountered before that I found to be extremely intriguing. For example, about two and a half minutes in, Amber Case discusses the idea of what she calls the “second self” that most of us have created for ourselves. This second self comes in the form of our online personas (i.e. the profiles we create on Facebook, Twitter, and numerous other sites), and “People are interacting with your second self when you’re not there”. I found this point fascinating because one of the things Amber Case is worried about is that this can create a lack of self-reflection because we are so worried about how everyone else perceives our second self that we don't take the same amount of time understanding who we are outside of the.