If you think your use of social media is private, think again. The internet has made it easy to share information, and the things we share online are very revealing about who we are.
The popular assumption is that social media like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat and so on are just places where we can send messages to our friends, or see what they’re doing. But in fact they are much more than that: they are places where we project ourselves in a form that others can use to reconstruct us in their own image.
Social media Sydney gives us a kind of double exposure: when we look at someone through the lens of social media, we see how that person looks when we look at her. That’s why comments such as “You’re such a liar” or “I hope you die” seem so significant: they remind us that when people comment on your posts, they are commenting on the person you present to them instead of the real you.
As the benefits of social media become clearer, we will see more and more people who take all their photos and posts and other public communications from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on, and think themselves invisible.
But they aren’t invisible. The digital versions of themselves are still there: across the Internet in searchable form. They don’t know what they’re doing to themselves, but they’re doing it.
Social media is a way to show off. It’s like looking in a mirror, only the mirror is on the other side of the planet. If you want to be part of the global conversation, you’ve got to give up some privacy. And because your conversations are public, you’re also subject to public scrutiny.
Social media is a way to show off. It’s like looking in a mirror, only the mirror is on the other side of the planet. If you want to be part of the global conversation, you’ve got to give up some privacy. And because your conversations are public, you’re also subject to public scrutiny.
What you share on social media is no longer just an opinion; it’s an act, and there are consequences. That can be wonderful or awful; if it’s good, then it frees you to do what you want; if it’s bad, then everything you say will be taken as evidence against you. The fact that your identity is tied to these acts (and not just by happenstance) means that if you make a mistake or do something embarrassing, it can get out. Even if someone else didn’t publish anything, they may still spill the beans. Since there are so many people with cameras and microphones watching us all the time now, that could be enough to ruin your reputation forever.
Social media is widely used by teenagers, and so it’s easy to think that it doesn’t matter, that teenagers are invincible. But the truth is that social media is a double-edged sword. It can help you achieve your dreams, but it can also make it hard to distinguish the tricks from the truth.
Jeff Bezos, for example, said a year ago that a newspaper was “a very expensive way of going to the doctor.” And if he’d been talking about health care, I would have agreed with him. But now look at what he says about newspapers. He talks as if they were still relevant, as if they could still be trusted as a source of news. But now I look at their business model and see that it’s based on advertising revenue from readers who have no choice but to click on ads just because the whole purpose of the paper is to advertise products they don’t need. More info about the advertising cost in social media.
Newspapers were once a simple way for a local community to share information. They were a community resource, not an advertising medium. Now they have turned into an advertising medium for people who have no choice but to use them as such because there’s nothing else around.