You know I just discovered how to make Ubisoft Connect rewards work on Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and that means that I can pick up some free stuff in-game and that’s...handy. I didn’t know this. Hm.
Don’t forget that this upcoming week is when FAT BEAR WEEK begins!
Also reminder that I’ve got a Fun Fact Friday tag on Tumblr for Fridays.
Anyway I’m going to sound like an old person and complain about social media for a bit! This isn’t about fiction/criticism as much as thing I’ve been thinking about.
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Social Media & Unintentional Effects on Relationships
I am going to talk about the possible unintentional effects of social media; this isn’t going to be about misinformation or your information being sold to advertisers or things like that. That’s kind of obviously evil and I don’t know if I’m equipped to talk about that in any capacity other than, “Don’t be a dick, don’t share false information, and the corporations are totally out for your money/soul.”
But I’ve been thinking a lot lately, now that I know so many people getting married and having children, that I don’t understand the appeal, but also more relevantly to the essay that a lot of us have stuff on our Facebook accounts and I don’t know if that’s… I don’t want to use the word ‘appropriate’ but that’s what comes to mind. I’m not talking about like college parties or that. I mean…
Okay. People have baby pictures. Your parents have baby pictures of you somewhere. Maybe they’re in a visible place in their homes! That’s probably okay, unless you specifically told them not to do that and they’re still doing it. But what I’m seeing on Facebook every so often are people taking pictures of their infant and toddler children basically every other day, if not more often, and sharing them with the world. Sometimes these baby pictures include things like “Baby’s first bath!” or “Here’s my baby wandering around naked, te-he!”
I’m sorry, would you be thrilled if your parents started sharing pictures of you as a naked baby on the Internet? Yeah, babies are naked sometimes, and sometimes you show people baby pictures. That’s fine. But there’s something quite different between showing the person sitting next to you pictures of your baby taking a bath and it being on the Internet. Of course these things can be deleted, and I don’t know that anyone’s expecting, twenty years from now, all of today’s babies will dig through Facebook and find dozens of their own baby pictures. I’ve noticed that in general people don’t tend to look at older Facebook photos. But that also means that a lot of people are probably not thinking of deleting their old photos.
I don’t think people should be constantly posting pictures of their young children on Facebook is what I’m getting at. Not because it’s wrong at the moment, but I am worried about a generation of children growing up and realizing that their pictures have been on the Internet for decades in embarrassing moments that their parents decided to share with the world. Not just once or twice, but for basically their entire childhood. I don’t want a lot of my baby pictures out in public.
Also with people getting married, there are people’s pictures with past relationships? And that strikes me as weird. Not as bad as baby pictures all over, usually, and I imagine people who get along with their exes are probably fine. I know that some people, upon a breakup, delete all pictures that depict them with their exes. And that used to strike me as a bit much, but at the same time, this is a public platform, and I get that some people might not want to be associated with a past relationship, especially if it ended badly.
But it’s all there. It’s all recorded in Facebook. No, we can’t delete the past, fine, but there’s a difference between admitting and not covering up past relationships, and having them all on display on a public platform. And this one’s trickier than the baby pictures I think, because it probably isn’t ideal to just not post pictures of yourself with your significant other until you’re sure it’ll work out, because that seems overly like you’re terrified of doing anything close to commitment.
I don’t know how this is going to shake out, but I think some time, maybe not soon, we will start to look more and more about how social media affects people in the long-term. Not just in the ‘Facebook is actively showing me things to make me mad’ kind of way (although it is, and you should be aware of that) but in a ‘I am displaying all of my relationships to the world for as long as the Internet exists and that’s probably not healthy in the long run.’
I’m not trying to say social media is inherently evil or anything like that. There’s a lot of good that comes from it, and from being able to share parts of your life with each other and with the world. But I have concerns about how people’s lives and relationships are affected further down the line.
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