Ten years ago, the world of social media was very different. For me, I only had a handful of friends on good old Myspace, where we would post a few photos and keep each other updated on our lives. It was all quite silly and playful, a way to communicate after school and tide over the boredom. Today, I have over 700 people on Facebook over half of which I barely know, that post frequent life updates, which allow me, often an effective stranger or acquaintance at best, to see into various unknown corners of their lives. After years of mindlessly scrolling Facebook I have realized the level of intimacy this has reached and how ridiculous our internet lives have become.
A few weeks ago my mum and I undertook a classic family bonding activity and dug out our photo albums. We sat there for hours, laughing through photos of my dad’s cute banana hair style as a kid and getting feels at photos of our old dog as a puppy. My favourite part was my parent’s holiday snaps from when they were jetsetters before they had me. There was this personal essence to them hard to describe; they were mostly off guard, the beauty of the moment captured by the photograph rather than a moment created for it. I felt like I was seeing an intimate period of my parent’s lives and it made me feel a little emotional, looking at special moments that probably shaped who they are today. No one else will probably ever see those photos (unless I decide I am in fact capable of producing grandchildren- ambitions considering I struggle to feed the cat regularly), to me they feel like a personal treasure exclusive to my family.
Today we take photos with a new awareness of our audience. I am guilty of posing for various shots with the ultimate intention of posting them on Instagram, or collating my favourite recent photos of my friends in Facebook albums. Sometimes this is harmless; maybe you want to reminisce a festival or party or just let your loved ones know you’ve been travelling. Don’t get me wrong, I love posting photos for my friends to see and interact with online and being able to see what they’re up to too. Finding the line is hard, but my problem is that personal photos are creeping on to Facebook that I don’t feel like I have the right to be looking at. Mindless Facebook scrolling often leads me to looking through couples’ holiday photos, or family photos from Christmas, or blurry pictures of people fucked up in the club. Most of the time, I barely know who I’m creeping on, yet I somehow am gaining this incredibly personal insight into their lives. The candid disposables from my parent’s youth have gone, replaced by selfies of Amy and Jake’s romantic getaway to Tenerife.
Posing naturally for our holiday album
It makes me sad such special moments have almost lost that personal aspect found before the rise of social media and it will only get worse with the planet’s rapid innovations in technology. My children won’t share in the moments I did with my mum the other week, instead they just have to search me on Facebook and see for themselves. I am aware it is hard to draw the line as to what is too personal, and I too am probably guilty of posting content too personal for the public’s eyes, but I feel like we need to change our mind-set when it comes to social media. I don’t want someone I added on Facebook for the sole purpose of a uni project, or someone I added when I was fourteen because I thought they were cool, to see cute photos of me and my boyfriend loving it up on holiday. Similarly, I don’t want to pry on their Christmas lunch selfies with their family. We need to do a little more thinking before we press that ‘share’ button in order to keep personal moments just that.
Or could we all just use disposable cameras and Nokias again please?
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