Raju Shaikh has two Facebook accounts.

The boy who lives in a Delhi shelter uses his first account like the rest of us — to add his friends and share birthday photos.

The second account, as Globe and Mail's South Asia correspondent Stephanie Nolen found out during her visit, is "not totally reality-based."

Shaikh's other account portrays him as a New Yorker who studies at New York University and works at ESPN. He supports these stories by Photoshopping himself into photos in front of local attractions.

"He was creating a personality that he thought people were more likely to want to be friends with than 'Raju the street kid,' but also the life he thinks he's going to have or he wants to have," Nolen told CBC Radio's Spark host Nora Young in an interview that aired March 15.

Shaikh's Facebook friends in his second account who live in various places around the world are ultimately strangers who have accepted his random invitations.

"It's about seeing if you can make those connections with people from outside the very small place you are in and … start to navigate your way out there into a larger world," Nolan said.

"Facebook is maybe a safe way to start doing that."

Managing people's impressions

Shaikh isn’t the only internet user who tries to construct an online identity that's sometimes more pleasant than the reality.

Alice Marwick, assistant professor at Fordham University in New York who studies online identity and consumer culture, compares users' online behaviours to a social performance.

"People tend to vary their self presentation based on their context and audience," Marwick explained.

When Facebook users add contacts from different social circles, the phenomenon known as "context collapse" takes place, requiring them to create virtual personas that are appropriate for all audience.

"Context collapse ... is not necessarily about being fake or being false, but it's about really wanting some control over managing other people's impression of you," she said.

Marwick goes on to talk about how many social media sites, like Facebook, offer a place where users can live out their fantasy.

For example, Pinterest, an image curating service where users can "re-pin" photos, attracts predominantly female users who collect photos of luxury fashion items they can't necessarily afford.

To hear the full interviews, including Nolen's story about the Facebook-savvy boys at the Delhi shelter, click the play button in the audio player at the top of the story.