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Facepalm (Photo credit: Brandon Grasley)
For the last couple of months, I have witnessed more and more discussions centered on the role social media has played in people’s lives.
“Social media is great, but I hate how nothing I post can’t really stay private anymore,” most folks conclude before updating their profiles with the latest trite details about their day.
Ten years ago, when I started my career, Facebook and Twitter were not around. We only had professional forums and communities to network with people in our niches. If you wanted to become a member, you had to give away personal information. Of course, you could choose how widely you wanted this information to be available. However, when it came to interactions, anything you said ended up indexed in search engines.
In the early 2000s, there were only 360 million Internet users in the world. In 2013, there are 2.4 billion.
A decade ago, people already talked about privacy issues. And yet, some of the things they shared in forums and communities were raw and eye-rolling.
So no, social media did not kill privacy. It has just given us a false sense of self-entitlement.
Privacy is truly what you make of it. If you do not want people to see something, do not share it with them.
“The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.” – Matthew Arnold
