Privacy & Peace of Mind

Feed your minds, mind your feeds.

by ODA Ajaba

A concerning amount of people are throwing away their lives online in the hopes of

catching lightning-in-a-bottle that they hope to spin into online careers, to the point where

people are losing jobs and ruining relationships over what they put online.

This is all very much a feature of social media in its modern form. The ire social media companies rightfully get for their shady and exploitative practices is the strongest its ever been has been well earned and well documented online.The ire social media companies rightfully receive for their shady and exploitative practices is stronger than ever and has been well earned and well documented online

Back in the 2000’s people were taught to be really careful with any and all info because

we were more privacy minded back then. People were taught that sharing about their lives to

anyone more than their closest friend was dangerous on the internet. I bring it up because of the whiplash I get from seeing the complete 180 of those principles.

Multiple industries from technology to marketing function solely off the fact that we share a lot of our data with them. Sometimes data they personally collected, and sometimes data we personally post online.

Social media, by encouraging people to share themselves online and feed the platform’s attention economy, has transformed the once-cautious individual into today’s average user, someone who could easily become a niche micro-celebrity simply by sharing mundane thoughts and experiences.

We also need to regulate what kinds of content we consume and who we interact with. As

bad as social media can be in its current form, we also do have the obligation and I dare say

responsibility to curate our own online experience. Whether it be blocking negative users or

avoiding comments altogether, there are always tools afforded to the user that allows them to

control what they consume to an extent.

I’ve seen interactions online where instead of just blocking a person acting in bad faith,

or blocking an infamous grifter who gets on your nerves every week; people just respond with

vitriol, taking time out of their busy day to respond to some random on the internet. Who’s

really worth the time when you could block, mute, ignore, and move on.

How social media can be fixed is mostly something that must be done on an individual

level. One needs to take in what kind of content they're consuming, how often they’re consuming it, who they're interacting with and how, all of these need to be considered to determine how social media impacts your life specifically. It’s at that point where we can identify these patterns of choices, thoughts, and behaviors that lead to more unpleasant experiences on the internet. It’s up to us to break our own doomscrolling habit.