Little, White Boxes

Little, white boxes rule my life. It’s an unfortunate side effect of living in the Internet age. You know the boxes: the ones that you have to fill out with a catchy title on a job site so that someone will read your resume; the ones that want you to fill in your idea of a perfect match so that the database can send you suitable significant others; the ones on your website where you are supposed to put an article that has pertinent information, is intelligent, and has a point…

These little boxes are becoming harder and harder to fill in. Maybe it’s a function of the little box itself. Before the ease of the Internet, you had a form to fill out. The form was only so long, you only had so much room, and you had to get to your point immediately or not at all. Now we have unlimited space to dispense onto the world who we are and what we are looking for. For me, though, the boxes have started to make me claustrophobic.

Maybe it’s the notion that I can be captured inside this box. Whoever and whatever I’m applying to (business school, jobs, dating, Ebay feedback, etc.) can’t possibly get an idea of who they are dealing with based on my answers in their little boxes. I try to have my voice heard, to represent myself accurately, but there’s always some mystery about how it’s being received on the other end.

For a girl who lives her life on the Internet, it’s a startling idea that maybe this medium isn’t representing me in the best light. When presented with a little, white box, I have to ask, “What do I need to say that will get the most attention?” instead of “What do I want to say about myself?” Even though those little boxes are limitless, we only have so much time to make an impression. In person, you can control this much more thoroughly. Online, that impression is made in your title, or headline, or Facebook status. I find myself starting to think in blog-snippets, phrasing my daily life in terms of how it will be reported later on the Internet. “Mari is…”

More so, I find a problem internally when asked to take who I am and put it in a box. “Please write, in the space provided, your goals and aspirations with which our program will assist you.” Sure. No problem. And then that little, white box stares you in the face, daring you to come up with an answer. It’s not introspection that is lacking, but the willingness to put onto (virtual) paper that this is all I am.

I don’t have a solution. Maybe I don’t even have a point. But I have filled up my little, white box with something real. This box can speak to who I am, but only to a part of me. If we plan on fragmenting our world into little, white boxes, we need to remember that they’re only a gateway to the person behind them.