Connie’s fortnightly column on student life, published on Fridays…
As many of us are aware, we are battling a pandemic of chronic online oversharing. Social media doesn’t allow for much personal privacy, and it has blurred the lines between our public and private lives. Look around you and you’ll quickly notice that we, ‘Gen Z’, have a weaker instinct to protect our privacy than older generations, who would be dumbfounded by practices like sharing a picture of your morning iced latte with hundreds of people.
Perhaps this is because it’s difficult to place value on something you’ve never had; many of us have grown up on social media and don’t know life without it, meaning we’ve never experienced true privacy.
I’ve avidly used Instagram since the age of eight, and while my content has evolved from harmless pictures of my hamster to the more toxic pressure of getting the ‘perfect’ bikini holiday photo, I find it sad that there was only a small window of my life spent offline, where I wasn’t worried about documenting my existence for external approval.
I used to hide behind the phrase ‘I just love taking photos’ to justify my inability to live in the moment and was unable to relax until I’d taken postable snaps whilst doing anything interesting. I used social media to gain approval and ease insecurities, but it only fostered more.
The pressure of constant visibility makes you feel like you must perform for the world. Our social media content is often for validation, and as we’ve normalised this state of constant connection, we produce large volumes of it. Users become unable to switch off, driven by an insatiable need to ‘keep in touch’ and stay up to date.
This can only harm young, impressionable people – a simultaneously exhausting and anxiety-inducing cycle. A balance needs to be found between privacy and connection.
It’s essential that we start to reclaim healthy social boundaries in an oversharing world. There’s a strong case for us all knowing a lot less about each other.
For a start, the bombardment from other people’s good news needs to stop. Seeing small snippets of others’ seemingly perfect lives causes feelings of inadequacy and disconnects you from reality. Seeing the glossy, sunny, January photo dump of that girl from sixth form who moved to Australia, right before your 9am lecture in rain-sodden Sheffield, can make you question whether you’re on the right path in life.
By knowing less about each other, we could reduce FOMO and gain the autonomy to appreciate our own lives. No longer seeing our own experiences through the lens of others would allow us to live our lives more authentically. Who knows, that girl from sixth form could be rethinking her life choices after seeing photos from my Wednesday night out in Bierkeller. Social media promises that the grass is always greener… it often isn’t.
Relationships, both romantic and platonic, would also benefit if we were a little less informed on each other. A friend recently described how she’d taken a deepdive into the digital footprint of a guy she’s seeing, and within fifteen minutes, had found all kinds of photos – from ex-partners to the girl he’d taken to the year six disco – all courtesy of his mum’s public Facebook profile. Your first instinct might be to label her an unhinged stalker with too much time on her hands, but is it really stalking if it’s all there for public consumption? All these different chapters of his private life have been disclosed voluntarily, exhaustively documented and just a few clicks away from anyone’s reach. So, although it feels like it should be a personal violation, it isn’t, it’s just how social media works.
These platforms rob us of the most beautiful part of any relationship; the ongoing discovery of the other person, slowly learning their unique qualities and experiences. If someone’s entire past is sprawled out in front of us from the very beginning, it’s the mental equivalent of walking around naked. It leaves us with no layers to peel off.
Just because phones enable us to all be connected, no matter where we are or what we’re doing, it doesn’t mean we should expect everyone to be available to us at all times. Nor should we feel pressured to give everyone instant access to ourselves. Features like read receipts on Whatsapp can make you feel obligated to respond to friends and partners, even when you’re not in the right headspace to take on more. I’ve been guilty of feeling momentarily frustrated when I don’t hear back from someone: if you’re on your phone, why can’t you respond? It baffles me that people pay to take this toxicity further with ‘Snapchat-premium’ allowing you to see when someone is half-swiping a chat and ignoring you.
The human mind – in my opinion at least – isn’t wired to process the sheer volume of information we encounter on social media. Broadcasting intimate details about our lives to an endless stream of strangers is unnatural and leads to emotional burnout. Wouldn’t the pros outweigh the cons if we knew less about each other?
Image Credits- Unsplash
