Facebook Confidence

My parents love to tell me that my generation no longer knows how to interact with people in "real life" and that texting and facebook are ruining our relationships.

I don't know if these things are ruining it all for us, but I do believe in a thing I like to call facebook confidence. There are some things we do or say over facebook that we would never say in "real life". Often times this applies to texts as well. Why is it so easy for this to happen? My 2 main theories are:

1. We can't see the person, so it doesn't seem as real. In fact, there have been several occasions I can think of in my life and my friend's lives when the things a person said over facebook were never mentioned again in "real life" or they were only mentioned because another topic was brought up that reminded them of that time you were a huge freak and asked them if they were "getting your hints". This leads to the facebook confidence almost being not "real" itself. If things get weird on facebook, you can always log off and act like "facebook chat was totally freaking out", but in "real life" if you just randomly walked away in the middle of the conversation you will most certainly be labeled socially awkward.

2. We have time to think of what to say. We have power that is not there in a face-to-face conversation. We have the ability to type and erase until we think of something witty and intelligent to send. The downfall of this is that so do they. And then you feel the need to trump the wit and intelligence with each thing you type, thinking that you are hilarius/bold/smart/flirtatious or whatever (which IS facebook confidence) and it can get weird. Especially later that night when you are lying in bed reviewing in your head what you said.